THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE: Editorial: Beneath campaign nastiness, legitimate concerns about Fetterman’s health.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman has not fully recovered from the serious stroke he suffered in May. His campaign has acknowledged his obvious struggles with “auditory processing” and speech, but the persistence of those struggles has contrasted with the campaign’s rosier predictions of a return to the rigors of campaigning, including debating his opponent, Mehmet Oz.
If Mr. Fetterman is not well enough to debate his opponent, that raises serious concerns about his ability to serve as a United States senator.
Related: Salena Zito: The truth about John Fetterman.
On May 13, just days before the May party primary here in the Keystone State, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman suffered a stroke while on the campaign trail in Lancaster in his run for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.
As reporters and supporters noticed his absence, his campaign released a statement saying he had been hospitalized over that weekend after suffering a stroke caused by a clot from his heart during an episode of atrial fibrillation.
In the statement, Fetterman said: “The good news is I’m feeling much better and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”
The family referred to the medical incident as a “bump in the road.”
The public was told he would be back at the beginning of July. That moved to mid-July, then to August. With each change, no updates on his condition were made available to the press or the public.
The political ads he ran most of the summer had been recorded before the stroke. And although a flurry of Tweets did come from his account at a brisk pace, none of them provided a doctor’s update on his condition. Rather, they all centered on where his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had lived prior to 2020.
It is not clear if Fetterman does all of his own tweets or if staff do them as well. His campaign staff did not provide an answer to that question by deadline.
When Fetterman returned to the public forum in Erie, the stroke went from “a bump in the road” to him saying, “I almost died,” leaving open the delicate question of what is the extent of his illness, with no one to date offering that answer.
It was later revealed that the stroke required surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator because he had a serious heart condition, one that neither reporters nor voters nor his most ardent supporters knew he had.
His teleprompter reading skills are approaching Brandon’s Trunalimunumaprzure territory:
Yikes. pic.twitter.com/tm2Cc0mPCm
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 6, 2022