ALTOONA, Pennsylvania — On July 24, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman tweeted a photo of himself with a bemused look on his face next to a Sheetz gas pump with the $106.86 amount he had to pay to fill up his vehicle.
The tweet clearly showed not only a selfie of him but also a photo of the iconic red Sheetz banner as he took aim at the Altoona-based family-owned company as the special interests and corporate executives who are responsible for raising our gas prices.
Spokesman Joe Calvello, however, said it wasn’t really a dig at Sheetz, even though he was literally standing at a Sheetz pump and tweeting it. According to Calvello, Fetterman loves Sheetz, believes it is “the best gas station in the world,” and that attack was really about big corporations and not the third-generation success story out of Blair County.
“What John doesn’t support he said are the massive companies like Chevron, Exxon, and Shell, which have seen their profits increased since last year as they continue to charge us sky-high prices,” said Calvello.
Except that is not what Fetterman tweeted. The photo evidence is right there — he clearly insinuated that he was being gouged for his gasoline at Sheetz.
“The implication is right in front of your eyes,” said Martinsburg fire chief Randy Acker in the Sheetz home county of Blair. “I don’t know how you can read that any other way.”
So the question is, are voters and the press supposed to take Fetterman’s tweets seriously, or literally? It was a question I had posed in an interview with Donald Trump in the Atlantic exactly six years ago, the phrase and observation that caused the press and Democrats to go apoplectic.
However, if you go through Fetterman’s Trumpy tweets as of late, the same question arises.
Fetterman had a stroke just before the May primary. In the time since, the York native and former Braddock mayor has run his campaign almost entirely over Twitter as he recovers from the lingering effects of the stroke on his health and ability to communicate.
It is a platform he has used mercilessly to make fun of or attack personally the Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz, much like Trump used Twitter to attack the “low-energy” Jeb Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, and “Crooked Hillary” Clinton in 2016.
“If you don’t know much about Fetterman’s politics, you would think he was a blue-collar guy going after the man in the suit who is part of the establishment,” one Suburban voter remarked. “If you were a Trump voter, that is appealing.”
But if the same criticisms from the press about Trump’s tweets are applied equally to Fetterman, the question becomes, “Was he seriously going after Sheetz?” Because around here, that is like tugging on Superman’s cape or pulling the mask off the Lone Ranger.
Just ask anyone here in Blair County. No matter their political persuasion, Sheetz to them is the little guy. It is the local family operation that began in 1952 and went on to achieve the American dream. Today, Sheetz operates over 640 stores and employs more than 23,000 people, who are offered a competitive pay and benefits package that includes a 401(k), an employee stock ownership plan, and flexible schedules and opportunities for advancement.
Last week, Sheetz announced it was expanding with 30 new locations in the next five years. It was also named one of the 2022 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, thanks to its exceptional workplace culture.
Part of the danger of using Twitter to communicate with voters is that tweets are too short to delve into anything beyond the basic. One must either assume voters are too dumb or too mad at the other guy to investigate the topic of one’s tweets more closely. This was a classic theme of Trump tweets, and it arises here again.
The gasoline price-gouging issue comes up every time fuel costs rise. Every time, it becomes a populist rallying cry for the FTC to investigate, and every time the FTC investigates, it concludes that gasoline prices are the result of supply and demand, not of greed or illegal manipulations.
Until Fetterman returns to the campaign trail and does what he has always been good at — connecting with voters such as the ones here in Blair County — he seems likely to continue this new Trump approach to campaigning to win the seat that Republican Sen. Pat Toomey has held for two terms.
Much to the chagrin of Clinton supporters, Trump’s rage tweets worked. Even when he tweeted absurd things that reporters endlessly questioned, voters didn’t care if they were half-truths or quarter-truths; it kept working until it stopped working in 2020.
Meanwhile, his opponent, Oz, is doing what Fetterman used to do so well before he took ill. He is pounding the pavement, the cow stalls, and the gravel roads. He is meeting voters one-on-one and listening to them. To date, the Republican nominee has made over 130 stops since the first of July traversing more than 3,000 miles by car.
Meanwhile, Fetterman has tweeted. On Twitter, he has volleyed back and forth with his position on hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a staple of the state’s economy for more than a decade now. In his first run for Senate in 2016, he called for a fracking moratorium. He lost that primary, then said in his successful 2018 election for lieutenant governor that he didn’t support fracking and wanted to see it phased out.
Today, he has apparently — perhaps, maybe, no one knows for sure — changed his tune on fracking. His campaign website still calls climate change an “existential threat” and says that “we need to transition to clean energy as quickly as possible.”
If you thought the Sheetz family employed a lot of people in this state, the natural gas industry and downstream companies that support it employ hundreds of thousands, accounting for 6.1% of Pennsylvania’s total employment.
So, did Fetterman literally mean it when he tweeted he was against it? Was he serious when he changed his mind? Pennsylvanians may never know. Journalists seem utterly unwilling to press him on that or any other tweet, or to ask him when he will resume his duties as the sitting lieutenant governor. But they’ll have a chance next week, when he holds his first campaign event since May.
