John Fetterman is acid reflux surging through our body politic.
Surely there must be a cure. But good luck with that.
Hounding him until he quits is theoretically possible, but why would he want to give up the perks of doing nothing on the taxpayer’s dime? Throwing him out in a statewide voter recall would be ideal, but the U.S. Constitution forbids it. That leaves one option – jettisoning his worthless ass in a Senate Democratic primary – but that’s two years away and even then he’d still be around, free to do nothing til his lame-duck gig expires at the dawn of 2029.
The brutal expose in the Wall Street Journal – which describes him blowing off a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia meeting, blowing off a meeting with paralyzed military vets in order to gab on Fox News, and ghosting virtually all his Senate committee hearings – is yet another gut check for the 753,000 Democratic voters who inexplicably bought his phony act and made him their party nominee in 2022 – only to see him behave like a slacker who’d put the “The Dude” to shame.
This purported champion of the little guy reportedly has little interest in his job “beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures.” And it’s working so well he’s now more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than their own senator, MAGA echo Dave McCormick. When Fetterman tells reporters that he doesn’t “have strong feelings” about releasing the Epstein files – wow, that’s MAGA gold.
It’s a shame that We the People have no imminent means to heave the guy from office – our Founding Fathers rejected the recall option as an excess of democracy – but part of the blame for Fetterman surely rests with the progressive lefties who chose him in that 2022 Dem primary.
There was a perfectly credible and qualified candidate in that primary. Unlike Fetterman, who as lieutenant governor had already earned a reputation for blowing off work, his opponent, Congressman Conor Lamb, was an ex-Marine who’d already served four years in the House after winning as a Democrat in a normally red area of western Pennsylvania.
But, tragically so – Lamb had some perceived liabilities: (1) He sometimes wore a suit, which made him look like just another politician, (2) He was in Congress, which made him radioactive to progressives who hate insiders, and (3) His 99 percent pro-Dem voting record wasn’t good enough for lefty litmus-testers, because word got around that in earlier years he’d broken with House Democrats 23 percent of the time (2018) and 17 percent of the time (2020). By contrast, Fetterman was out there talking a good game about progressive hot-button issues and dressing like a slob to woo working stiffs, and the fact that he’d gone to Harvard and had lived off his affluent conservative Republican parents well into his forties…none of that seemed to matter, or was widely known.
I won’t be drawn into a debate over whether Fetterman’s 2022 stroke scrambled his brain and turned him MAGA on key issues (he supports Donald Trump’s disastrous war with Iran and was the sole Dem senator who refused to curb he president’s war powers). By dint of his work habits alone – as lieutenant governor, he blew off his duties roughly one-third of the time – he was always ill qualified for the Senate.
To thwart future Fettermans, I suppose the only solution is for feckless and oblivious voters to pay more attention, do their homework, and not be so easily swayed by snake-oil salesmen. That admonition also applies to the MAGAts who propelled Trump to power, but, unlike those cultists, at least Pennsylvania’s progressives have been willing to admit they were snookered.
Fetterman continues to insist that he will “never” defect to the Senate Republicans, but by now it should be obvious that whatever he says has all the value of soiled Kleenex. It’s also obvious that if Democrats are truly determined to control the Senate in 2027, they need to mount a blue tsunami high enough to land them 52 seats. Because if they notch a mere 51, Fetterman would have outsize clout; he could switch parties and gift the tie-breaking votes to J.D. Vance, or he could simply leverage that threat as needed.
Fifty two seats is the only interim treatment. It won’t do much for the constituents who need help from the Democrats’ Dude, but we can still laugh at his cinematic doppelganger.
The Big Lebowski: “Are you employed, sir?”
The Dude (perplexed): “Employed?”
The Big Lebowski: “You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”
The Dude: “Is this a… what day is this?”
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]