Loyalty to the president is not exactly a hallmark of the Democratic centrists in Congress.
Look no further than Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has asserted his independence by standing in the way of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
Yet Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), seemingly the newest addition to those ranks in the Senate, has done the polar opposite in his first year, running headlong toward the president despite his own maverick streak.
Biden has faced unending criticism from the Left over his support for Israel and tack toward the right on immigration, while his low approval ratings have establishment figures openly calling for a new generation of leadership.
Many expected Fetterman to be another headache for Biden when he arrived in Washington. His campaign fashioned him as a progressive icon, and he drew the endorsement of movement leaders such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
But he disappointed liberals when he distanced himself from the “progressive” label in December by invoking a mantra of Ronald Reagan: “I don’t feel like I’ve left the label. It’s just more that it’s left me,” he said.
His apparent transformation — Fetterman disputes he’s evolved at all — has Republicans giddy.
He says the Democrats calling for a cease-fire in Gaza lack “moral clarity” and that border security is a matter of common sense. Most recently, he raised eyebrows when he said he’s “willing to go pretty far” on H.R. 2, the House border bill that Democrats have declared a nonstarter.
“The new and improved Fetterman can wear whatever he wants if he keeps talking like that,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told Fox News, referring to Republicans upset over his decision to wear a hoodie and shorts at the Capitol.
The tactic is a common one for Democrats in purple or red states: signal that you’re not a rubber stamp for party leadership through your rhetoric and your votes. Just the other week, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), running for reelection in deep-red Montana, took a hard line on immigration by urging Biden to use his executive authority to secure the border.
Fetterman has shown some inclination to do that. He all but chided Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for not pressuring scandal-plagued Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) to step down.
Yet the critiques of his colleagues are somewhat unusual for a Democrat in a swing state such as Pennsylvania. Rather than distance himself from Biden, he uses them as a defense of the president.
That’s clearest when it comes to Israel’s war with Hamas. Fetterman calls Biden “courageous” for resisting calls for a cease-fire, though the president has begun to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the death toll mounts in Gaza.
Fetterman also gave Biden space to negotiate a Senate deal on immigration earlier this year even as Latino activists panned it as xenophobic. “It’s a reasonable conversation, and Democrats should engage,” he said at the time.
At first blush, Fetterman seems intent on moderating what he sees as the worst impulses of the Left. He is in favor of marijuana legalization and raising the minimum wage but has bucked progressive orthodoxy on policies that fall flat with voters. “Standing with Israel is compatible with being a good Democrat, and that’s what I consider myself, but if I get some flak for that, then I welcome the smoke,” he told the Washington Examiner.
That analysis, however, is incomplete. He’s also defended Biden from the establishment types wringing their hands over whether he can win a second term as president.
He’s flatly told Democratic strategist James Carville to “shut the f*** up” for warning that Biden will lose in November and took Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) to task last year for what he saw as his shadow campaign for president.
“I’d like to remind anybody, the last time there was a hot s*** governor that thought he could take out Trump, you know, Florida Man got dropped into the wood chipper,” he said in an interview, referring to the failed candidacy of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
Even there, Fetterman’s criticism extends to progressives. He has scolded “Squad” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for leading a protest vote against Biden in Michigan’s presidential primary.
Yet Fetterman’s punches clearly speak to a desire to defend Biden regardless of what corner of Washington his criticism comes from, going so far as to call him “my guy.” “He is my guy,” he said. “You’re goddamn right, I’m proud of him.”
Fetterman taunts the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into Biden as a farce and warns Democrats the same discontent that cost Al Gore and Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2000 and 2016 could come back to haunt them in November. “So go ahead, f*** around and find out in ’24,” he said.
That hardly means he’s blindly acquiescent. Fetterman clearly has an easier time stomaching the border reforms the president has resisted and declines to go as far as Biden in his criticism of Netanyahu. But his rebrand seems to be as much about being a party man as it is about shaking off the progressive label.
“I don’t chase and I don’t pander to the fringe,” he said of his political outlook. As for Biden inching to the left on Israel: “I don’t give him any advice. Certainly not about fashion, either.”
There were indications that Fetterman was not a down-the-line liberal. On the campaign trail, he signaled his support for both Israel and tougher border security. His embrace of fracking had also alienated him with environmentalists.
“There really isn’t an evolution,” he told the Washington Examiner. “For years, I’ve been very clear on the positions that I have on these kinds of things. And it really isn’t a surprise to anybody that’s been following my career and especially, you know, my race in ’22.”
Nonetheless, most voters are not familiar with his rise to political stardom. In four short years, he catapulted from being the mayor of a small town to Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor to a United States senator. What’s more, he came out of his 2022 Senate race branded a “radical” by Republicans.
Fetterman has five years before he will again face voters, and he won his first contest by 5 points. Yet a knock-on effect of his outspokenness is that he’s resetting his image. Fetterman entered the Senate in the throes of a health crisis. He suffered a stroke on the campaign trail that left him with auditory processing problems and just weeks into his term checked himself into the hospital to be treated for depression.
Once he returned, he overcame questions about his fitness with the same trollishness that defined his Senate campaign, joking about conspiracy theories that the John Fetterman roaming the halls of Congress is actually a body double.
And the difficult patch for his family has led him to extend compassion to other lawmakers undergoing crises of their own. He attracted headlines this month for discouraging the “recreational cruelty” of those relishing in the arrest of firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) son.
But the chief way Fetterman has found his footing is by marrying his centrist streak with a shock-jock level of punditry. He’s mocked Menendez as “Bobby Gold Bars” ever since federal authorities found a small fortune at his home and refers to his vanquished 2022 opponent as that “weirdo from New Jersey.”
He clearly wants to use his voice to make an impact in the Senate. After all, one of the reasons he’s considered a centrist and not merely an unorthodox Democrat is because he’s so willing to draw a public contrast with his colleagues.
It’s a shrewd move politically. A January poll from Quinnipiac University found a third of Pennsylvania voters viewed him more favorably for siding with stricter immigration policies, for example, compared to the 9% he turned off with that stance.
His call-it-as-I-see-it persona does not mean he will be more inclined to work with Republicans than any other Democrat, however. He seemed genuinely unsure when asked if he sees himself as a future deal-maker in the Senate now that several of them, most recently Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), will retire at the end of the year. “I don’t know. All I can be is just clear about where I’m at,” he said.
Biden wore that mantle proudly in his more than three decades in the Senate, and Fetterman does appear to see the president in himself. He drew a parallel between the gravity of his 2022 race — Democrats expanded their 50-50 majority because of him — and Biden’s success in flipping the White House.
“They put me to the wall, and he was running for president in 2020, and he’s held every line that he’s needed to hold,” he said.
“He is the only person in America that beat Trump,” he added, ”and he’s going to do that again.”
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Asked if there are policy areas on which he disagrees with Biden, Fetterman joked, “Well, when I found out that he was old, I was troubled,” alluding to the renewed focus on the president’s cognitive abilities.
“But no, he’s a great president,” he said. “You can disagree with someone on an issue, but you can still be 100,000% committed to them, and that’s where we should be on that.”
David Sivak is Congress and campaigns editor at the Washington Examiner.
