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Letters to the Herald

John Fetterman is not from “here”

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As he seeks to become a United States senator, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman claims that he got involved in politics to fight crime in “his city,” Braddock, Pa., after two of his students were gunned down.
The truth is, however, that Fetterman spent his entire adult life deliberately creating a narrative that he would use to achieve his insatiable ambition of getting elected to the Senate.
After growing up in York, and earning an M.B.A. in Connecticut, Fetterman moved to western Pennsylvania, where through AmeriCorps, he helped students prepare to take the GED test, while also working for an insurance company. Then, a couple of years later, Fetterman left Pennsylvania to pursue a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, before returning to Braddock and running for mayor.
Obviously, Fetterman did not go to Harvard just so that he could serve as mayor of Braddock, which paid only $150 a month. Fetterman moved to Braddock to launch his political career because a “Bernie-Sanders liberal” would find much greater success, politically, in Braddock than in York. With the help of his parents who gave him $54,000 in 2015, Fetterman put everything he had into serving as mayor and at developing his political narrative, instead of working for a living.
For a man who just wants to help his city and Pennsylvania, John Fetterman shows tenacious ambition. After unsuccessfully running for the Senate in 2016, Fetterman ran for lieutenant governor in 2018, and now, he is running for the Senate, again. This time, however, Fetterman does not want to lose. So, he relentlessly attacks his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Fetterman claims that Dr. Oz, a white heart surgeon, would not last two hours in Braddock, which has a predominantly Black population (70.83% in the 2020 census). Though it is not Braddock, Dr. Oz recently walked along Kensington Avenue, the epicenter of the opioid crisis in Philadelphia, and encouraged inflicted individuals to seek help, while Fetterman campaigned from his home near Pittsburgh by running expensive television advertisements in the Philadelphia region, barking, “(Dr. Oz is) not one of us!”
Much of Fetterman’s campaign urges Pennsylvania voters to reject Oz because he is not from “here.” “He is not one of us.” This claim ignores the fact that Dr. Oz attended college in Philadelphia, his wife is from Bryn Athyn, and that he bought a house in Montgomery County.
According to Fetterman’s argument, nobody in Southeastern Pennsylvania should vote for Fetterman because he, himself has never lived in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Braddock is about a six-hour drive from “here.” While Dr. Oz has strong connections to Southeastern Pennsylvania, Fetterman has none. John Fetterman is not one of us.
Michael Baluk, Warminster


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