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Sometimes a story catches fire and just a really straightforward look at the fine print shows there’s really nothing to it. One of the recent examples has to do with Sen. John Fetterman and the increasingly vocal complaints that he’s gone rogue from his progressive roots and is likely to one day become or is possibly already on his way to becoming the next Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. There’s actually a whole conversation on social media about how we’ll soon see him coming out against getting rid of or abolishing the filibuster.
I got to thinking about this yesterday when I read a piece on the subject at HuffPost. “‘Head-Spinning’: John Fetterman’s Breaks With Joe Biden Confound Some Democrats” reads the headline, with a dek that continues: “The Pennsylvania senator’s public breaks with the White House are drawing comparisons to more conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin.”
So who are the Democrats who think this? According to the article they’re Joe Manchin and Conor Lamb. Needless to say, Joe Manchin isn’t exactly an unbiased witness on the topic of whether Fetterman’s being too much like Joe Manchin. Meanwhile Lamb, who’s certainly a decent enough guy, is the guy who lost the Democratic primary to Fetterman and was generally running in the centrist/moderate lane against the more progressive Fetterman. So one doesn’t need to be crazy pro-Fetterman to think there’s some element of sour grapes at work here. He makes clear in the article that he doesn’t have any beef with Fetterman’s positions. He just thinks that his supporters might. Got that?
As a side note, it would be quite surprising if Fetterman went rogue on the filibuster since his chief of staff, Friend of TPM Adam Jentleson, is Mr. Filibuster Reform, literally one of the few high profile Democratic staffers/operatives who’s dedicated himself to the issue for years.
The real issue here is that the Fetterman-as-crypto-right-winger or Manchin-in-the-making is based on one single issue: Israel. And the argument that he’s now getting in Biden’s grill a la Manchin is also about Israel — in this case the idea being that Fetterman has continued whole hog pro-Israel (tref) while Biden has become increasingly critical of Israel’s campaign in Rafah.
Like okay, that’s maybe a little out of sync with Biden? Maybe? But kind of not really?
There’s no question that Israel and Gaza are very big issues for a lot of Democrats now. And if that’s people’s reason for being upset with Fetterman, that’s certainly fair. But what we see here is a pretty concerted effort to stretch and paste and papier-mâché his position on Israel into some general apostasy or emerging Manchinism when there’s really no evidence of that. Indeed, the HuffPost article makes clear that on universal health care, income inequality, LGBTQ rights, pot legalization and criminal justice reform, Fetterman remains outspokenly where he always was.
The only other scrap the Manchinism crowd has to work with is that Fetterman has said that tightening the southern border can’t or shouldn’t be a third rail for Democrats. But it’s hard to see how that’s any different from where President Biden is on the issue, or the bill he tried to get through Congress before Donald Trump put the kibosh on it in the House.
Where Fetterman has played into this is arguably at a rhetorical level. He’s pugilistic. Many of his comments on Israel have clearly been intentionally provocative. In response to progressive/Squad-like criticisms he’s said well, I’m not a progressive. That’s you, not me. I’m not woke. But this is really no different from the kind of shoot-from-the-hip regular guy-isms that have always been his brand. It’s just that he’s using it in a fight with a part of the party that’s in his face about his dogged support for Israel.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you’re going to be a progressive Democrat (in the generic rather than the branded Squad copyrighted sense) it’s always been clear that you’re going to be at least tonally different if your base is outside of one of the big left-leaning metroplexes. The conceit of the beltway has often been that that means you need to be more “centrist,” more business and tax-cut oriented, a bit more traditionalist on topics like abortion and LGBTQ issues. But Fetterman’s shown fairly clearly that that isn’t really the case. Often quite the contrary, especially on fiscal policy and populist economics issues.
Obviously sometimes people start with one disagreement with their social or political group and that spurs a broader unraveling of social and political identity. We’ve all seen that happen with people in politics. And it’s a reminder that the issue sets we buy into don’t always have an intrinsic commonality to them. Issue positions tend to come in sticky bundles that are bound together by a broader sense of political identity.
Maybe Fetterman will go full Sinema or, from an earlier era, full Lieberman. But there’s just no evidence for that at the moment. He’s out of the sync with much of the progressive left on Israel. And that’s about it.