Here's another rising Dem, John Fetterman.
John Fetterman: Pennsylvania Democrats’ tattooed rising star, explained
Two days ago, John Fetterman was the mayor of a 2,000-person western Pennsylvania Rust Belt town, running in a hotly contested primary for statewide office. Today he’s the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.
Fetterman, 48, is unmistakable: 6-foot-8, with a goatee and tattoos. And he dealt incumbent Democrat Lt. Gov. Mike Stack, an established name in Pennsylvania Democratic Party politics, a major upset Tuesday night. He also happens to have the backing of Bernie Sanders.
Fetterman drew 40 percent of the vote to clinch the nomination, emerging from a crowded field of four Democrats who were challenging Stack. The incumbent lieutenant governor has been mired in several scandals over excessive spending and mistreatment of staff, and failed to even gain incumbent Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s endorsement. Stack ended the night in third place, becoming the first lieutenant governor in modern Pennsylvania history to lose a primary reelection race.
Fetterman is now Wolf’s running mate, and the two will face Republican state Sen. Scott Wagner and real estate executive Jeff Bartos in November.
Fetterman’s rise has caught the nation’s eye. Over the past decade, he has made it in and out of national headlines — and Colbert Report appearances — as the Harvard University graduate who made it his mission to breathe life back into the predominantly black steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. But in the context of this midterm election cycle, Fetterman is almost a caricature of the 2016 presidential election postmortem.
“John Fetterman being the first person in Pennsylvania history to defeat a sitting Lt. Gov in a primary seems to obliterate the ‘Bernie-endorsed candidates can’t win’ fiction,” David Sirota, a prominent progressive commentator, tweeted.
But as stylistically different as Fetterman is to his running mate, there’s not a lot of daylight between the two on policy.
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| Wolf (Left) and Fetterman (Right) |
Fetterman’s career in politics is atypical. After graduating college, he followed his father’s path into the insurance business, but the death of a friend made him reconsider his career. He began working with Big Brothers Big Sisters, quit the insurance gig, and joined AmeriCorps, moving to Pittsburgh.
He went to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for a master’s degree in public policy and settled in Braddock, a town that had gone from holding 20,000 people and part of Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire to a population of just over 2,000, with unemployment at three times the state average. The town has been ravaged by drug abuse and a homicide rate in the double digits.
Fetterman won the Braddock mayoral election in 2005 by one vote. Four years later, he won in a landslide and appeared The Colbert Report, explaining the five dates tattooed on his arm to Stephen Colbert on national television. Each one represented a murder that had occurred in his town under his leadership.
more at the Original.
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