The Worst Democrat

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John Fetterman during his 2022 Senate run, and before his stroke, fooled me. He fooled me good. Fetterman back in 2022, taking on Oprah’s Dr. Oz for a U.S. Senate seat, ran a campaign with which I was not familiar. Unlike every other high-profile congressional campaign of my lifetime, Fetterman – who had served as Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor before running for Senate – straight up refused to engage Oz’s bad-faith political attacks. Fetterman and his campaign surrogates simply would not bite. In not taking the typical Republican bait on issues like taxes and abortion and guns, Fetterman countered Oz’s bad faith with no faith at all . He pointed and laughed and moved on. He mocked and joked both online and offline and left Oz and Republicans furious and flustered. It was a nice change – a decidedly weird campaign that did not reward the right wing’s bad faith. It was, I thought, a model for how to run a modern Democratic campaign. We learned again in 2024 – for a time, at least – that weird can work in opposing a radicalized Republican Party that operates (almost) exclusively in the worst possible faith. That’s all a distant memory today. Read more at BadFaithTimes.com .