Why does Fetterman Not Wear a Suit and Tie In The Senate?

[Borg warner]

Why does Fetterman not wear a suit and tie? It's not because he's brain-damaged, although he is, It's because he has a phony image to maintain. Symbolism over Substance.

 

The Media’s Misguided Love Affair with John Fetterman

 

By Jim Geraghty
October 12, 2022  National Review

On the menu today: A long look at the symbiotic relationship between Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman and the national media that fell in love with him – and fell in love with him surprisingly early in his tenure as mayor of the beleaguered, small, blue-collar town of Braddock PA. If you feel like the coverage of Fetterman is obsessed with what he wears and how he looks and notably less interested in what actually changed while he was mayor, your instincts are serving you well.

John Fetterman, Beyond the Hype

You can see why national political correspondents love to write about John Fetterman; they get to stretch those writing muscles describing his appearance.

 

Way back in 2009, Ed Pilkington of the Guardian called him, “America’s coolest mayor” and gushed, “Everything about him stands out from the crowd. . . . He is 6ft 8in tall and weighs 300lbs. With a shaven head, big ears and a goatee, he looks like a James Bond baddie rather than the political leader of a community in the north-eastern US. He walks around town dressed in black workers’ overalls and steelworkers’ boots.” Around that same time, a Rolling Stone profile of “The Mayor of Hell,” written by Janet Reitman began, “John Fetterman looks a lot like a convict. For starters, he’s 6-feet-8, weighs 320 pounds, and has a shaved head and a bushy chin beard. He dresses most of the time in modified prison garb: Dickies work shirt, baggy jeans, black steel-toe Dr. Martens. His arms are the size of small trees. He also sports some impressively large tattoos.

 

In a 2011 New York Times magazine profile calling him “the Mayor of Rust,” Sue Halpern described him as “a 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other . . . a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”

A bit more recently, James Bennet, the brother of Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennet, wrote in The Economist that, “Fetterman defies all political convention. Well over two metres tall, bald and goateed, he sports a hoodie and baggy shorts regardless of weather or occasion. At rallies he extends his long arms, taking the crowd in a virtual hug and revealing the tattoos lining his forearms.” Most recently, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine called him, “an enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory.”

In Politico, Holly Otterbein acknowledged the obvious: that Fetterman’s distinctive size and appearance are a big reason why he became one of the most frequently profiled small-town mayors in American history. “Fetterman is one of the most photographed rising stars in the Democratic Party. As gargantuan as Lurch Addams, with a bald head, goatee and closet full of Dickies shirts — and tattoos running down his arm marking every date a life was taken while he was mayor of his hard-knock steel town — Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is a cartoon image of a working guy from the Rust Belt. Which is catnip for glossy magazine spreads. In a 2011 New York Times magazine profile calling him “the Mayor of Rust,” Sue Halpern described him as “a 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other . . . a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”

You notice these profiles all start with Fetterman’s height, size, shaved head, tattoos, and casual clothing style. Yes, Fetterman looks like he spent his younger years working in a steel mill or an auto assembly line or a construction site. But as you probably might not have heard, he didn’t: 

 

Public records show — and Fetterman has openly acknowledged — that for a long stretch lasting well into his 40s, his main source of income came from his parents, who gave him and his family $54,000 in 2015 alone. That was part of the financial support his parents regularly provided when Fetterman’s only paying work was $150 a month as mayor of Braddock, a job he held from his mid-30s until he turned 49. He lived in an industrial-style loft he purchased from his sister for $1 after she paid $70,000 for it six years earlier. . . .

Fetterman, 52, grew up, in his own words, in a “cushy” environment in York County. His upbringing helped him get an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a master’s degree from Harvard without taking on student debt. Fetterman’s working-class image is just that — an image, or “blue-collar cosplay” as my podcast co-host calls it.

 

It is great that Fetterman’s parents’ generosity allowed him to dedicate himself to public service, leading to his unexpected victory in small-town Braddock’s mayoral election one year after he’d moved there. And Braddock is a small town, where the mayoral vote totals don’t exceed three digits. Fetterman won by a single vote in a three-candidate Democratic primary in 2005, and the powers of the mayor’s office were limited. Here’s how Fetterman described his arrival to the Pittsburgh City Paper, back in 2006: How did he choose Braddock as the place to stake his claim? As Fetterman tells it, while doing pro-bono grant-writing work for the Hill House Association, he wrote a proposal to help out-of-work youths get their GEDs and jobs. Hill House liked the proposal, and asked Fetterman if he’d head up an office in Braddock. Fetterman accepted, and began working there in 2001. By 2004, drawn to the borough’s post-industrial “Fight Club-feel,” he decided to live there. . . .

In late 2004, Fetterman purchased an old Presbyterian church building with family money. “I squatted in my church’s basement with no heat or windows for eight months through the coldest winter in a decade,” he says. And then he secured the warehouse next door.Fast-forward to this year. Mayor Fetterman has moved into the old concrete-block warehouse, having converted it into a Greenwich Village-style loft apartment with brown leather couches, exposed concrete block walls and stainless-steel countertops. He’s also allowed the kids he works with to paint graffiti inside it. He’s refurbished the church next door, having transformed it into a community center that provides space for after-school programs and community dances.

Fetterman is one of the few people making such investments here. His father owns a private insurance agency in York; Fetterman says the firm is successful enough to give him “the opportunity to target investments in Braddock . . . and to reinvest nearly all of my [work] salary . . . back into the community.”

 

There’s also this curious detail:

His activities, though, have not been welcomed by Braddock’s borough council, whose monthly meetings he no longer attends.Which falls in line with this Associated Press assessment of Fetterman’s time as lieutenant governor: Records from Fetterman’s four years in office, however, offer a different portrait of his time in the $179,000-a-year elected job. They show Fetterman typically kept a light work schedule and was often absent from state business, including presiding over the state Senate, which is one of his chief duties, according to an Associated Press review of his daily calendars and attendance records.

The review found that Fetterman’s daily schedule was blank during roughly one-third of workdays from January 2019, when he first took office, to May of this year, when he suffered a serious stroke. Even on days where his schedule showed he was active, a typical work day for Fetterman lasted between four and five hours, the records show.For a man who works in government, it seems fair to wonder just how interested Fetterman is in the day-to-day work of actually governing.

Fetterman became mayor of a small town that was so devastated by decades of economic decline that it was used as a filming location for the post-apocalyptic movie The Road, but surprisingly quickly, national and international correspondents came calling, eager to spotlight the Harvard graduate who looked like a Hell’s Angel and was trying to turn around a Rust Belt town.

In February 2009, the New York Times wrote a generous profile: Mostly, the mayor offers encouragement, ideas and energy. With the financial help of his father, who owns a commercial insurance agency in York, Pa., he also makes direct and indirect investments in local real estate. He set up the nonprofit organization, Braddock Redux, and gave it $50,000 to buy a former Presbyterian church to serve as a community center.In 2010, The Atlantic did a video interview with Fetterman, and in accompanying text gushed about his appearance: “Standing 6’8″ and built like an MMA fighter, he has a shaved head and a long, grey-flecked goatee. His forearms are emblazoned with tattoos” Fetterman appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show in 2009 and 2010.

 

t’s not that Braddock had experienced an amazing renaissance or economic turnaround during this time. Some longtime residents are irked by the national narrative that Fetterman turned their city into a success story, a narrative that overstates both town’s improvements and his role in them. While Fetterman was mayor, Braddock’s population continued to shrink. A recent Fetterman ad boasts, “We stopped gun deaths for five years.” Yes, but Fetterman was mayor for 13 years. (That ad also shows off his tattoos.) But the town’s violent-crime rate surged in 2016 and remained high until 2019 — when Fetterman departed to become lieutenant governor. (And make no mistake, Fetterman always intended to use the lieutenant-governor position as a stepping stone to the Senate; a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile in 2019 stated that, “At the end of four years, Mr. Fetterman hopes to have a record that would place him in good position to challenge again for Mr. Toomey’s Senate seat, if he decides to pursue it.”)

About the best you can say for Fetterman’s time as mayor is that he volunteered for a tough job and tried hard (for 4 or 5 hours a day) in difficult circumstances, which is noble. But America has lots of blue-collar small-town mayors who try hard, and they rarely if ever turn into national celebrities. Fetterman offered the national media exactly the kind of story they would love to tell: “Hey, this guy with an elected government job looks like he’s in a biker gang, but he went to Harvard and he’s promoting progressive policies!”
 

At some point, the governing record of the Next Big Thing in Democratic Politics stops mattering; he or she becomes famous for being famous. Everyone becomes too psychologically and emotionally invested in the figure’s continued success to really scrutinize whether they can possibly live up to hype. They become, to use the phrase from the Great Recession, “too big to fail.”

 

[geeorge]

I just consider him and ugly moron

[Valmet]

It’s disgraceful IMO. A visual indicator of the downward spiral…I can only imagine the outcry from Dems if he was a Republican Senator. 

[DAKA]

Changed the dress code for this useless TURD   500 + to 1 ??  

Does the Shitbird even show up?

[Walt Longmire]

He's a waste of human parts.

[Mrs.Cicero]

Because demoncretins cater to the lowest common denominator.  Also, he’s been a useless leech on society for decades, why stop now?

[El Spicoli]

2 hours ago, Walt Longmire said:

He's a waste of human parts.

Probably the most truthful answer.

[Rellik]

Blue collar cos play. 🤣🤣

[DWARREN123]

He takes up space and steals air!

[pipedreams]

[El Spicoli]

He is a man of the people representing his constituents of things and criminals.

[Valmet]

[janice6]

7 hours ago, Valmet said:

Proof that we are being led by, morons, fools and the demented!