(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Three quarters of the way into the televised Senate debate, the camera narrowed in on John Fetterman, the greying-goateed, muscled Democrat candidate, stuffed awkwardly into a suit, slightly yellowish skin tone, sweat sheening his shaved pate.

“Mr Fetterman,” the off-camera moderator said. “To return to the question you haven’t really cleared up, you say you support fracking but in 2018 you said you were against it, always have been. Can you explain the discrepancy?” There was a long pause. Was he about to deliver a zinger? He looked for a couple of seconds, seeming wildly confused. “I, uh, support fracking and I would like to clear… to… I support fracking and… I support fracking.”

The Harrisburg Democrats — about 20 of them, sitting around six small, round banquet tables — had been waiting for this moment, but not in a good way. Their candidate sounded like a bad robot, a malfunctioning robot. A stoned robot. They let out a few quiet sighs. They were barely audible, but they’d been fairly subdued from the get-go. They were out on a weeknight to watch their candidate get shellacked. No one had expected him to win. They might have thought — in the weeks leading up to this, with the Republicans now drawing level — that things couldn’t get worse. On a Tuesday night in the ‘burbs, over Bud lights and Philly cheesesteaks, they were being proven wrong.   

“Well, are y’all going to get out and start giving out those yard signs?” An hour earlier, Laura, the co-organiser of Dauphin County Democrats, had been rallying the quarter-filled upstairs “banqueting” room, with posters and yard signs ’round the wall, and the local station burbling on the TV hanging from the ceiling in one corner of the room. Fifteen, 20 people here? Black people, younger, bigger, in black “Fetterman for Senate” T-shirts; white people, older, crumblier, in miller shirts and haircuts done at home.

Rookies, an East Harrisburg bar and grill, halfway between Transparent Window Cleaning and a Burger King. Downstairs, a Tuesday night crowd, sports on eight big screens. Two tables of two girls who either absolutely didn’t want to be hit on or did; seven guys leaning over Bud Lights at the bar, trying to work out which it was, pretending to watch the ice hockey while they did. The bartender didn’t know where the Democrats Pennsylvania Senate Debate Watch Party was, and really didn’t understand those words put together. He was shocked to hear from the manager that it was upstairs; it was like finding a family in your attic.

Pennsylvania is gripped — well, half of it is gripped — by politics at the moment. The other half is gripped by sport, with the Phillies baseball team playing three days in a row, and a football match between the Eagles (Philadelphia) and the Steelers (Pittsburgh), a sort of State of Origin on steroids. The place is sports mad, a product of its status as a grimy, steel-town, happy-clappy dirt patch in the shadow of New York and Washington DC.

The Senate debate had something of the same scrappy underdog feel. It’s a Republican seat the Democrats had high hopes of winning. Retiring Senator Pat Toomey was one of the last centrist Republicans, a lifelong steel-town pol. The new Republican candidate is Dr Mehmet Oz, who, in the standard US manner, was a pioneering heart surgeon and a relentless publicity hound who got spots on Oprah’s show, then landed his own program on which he promoted a range of largely dubious and ineffective herbal treatments for major diseases. Every ad on the show was for shonky weight-loss tablets, enough for Senate committees to start condemning it.

He is fantastically wealthy, of course, and a longtime Republican of the business/immigrant-kid-made-good type, before veering during the primaries for the Senate slot into a sort of wonk-ish Trumpism, keeping an open mind on election fraud, looking for states to have the right to try “new ideas” on abortion, etc, etc. Devilishly handsome in his youth, he has aged into a sort of fez-and-smoking-jacket style, a sort of eagle-eye stare, his eyebrows looking like painted eyebrows painted on to painted eyebrows.

The only reason Oz doesn’t look and seem completely sinister — he wants to reform (i.e. destroy) social security and reinvent (i.e. destroy) Medicare and Medicaid, the public health funds for the aged and poor — is the dark, hulking hipsterness of his opponent. Fetterman was the privileged son of insurance people, a college football hero, who had a major life turn in his 30s. He started doing Big Brother and NGO programs and eventually became mayor of Braddock, a dying once-steel town, really a ‘burb of Pittsburgh — site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel plant and his first charity library, and the US’ first A&P supermarket (stop me if this is just too much America in one go). He revived it, in a fashion, with art stuff and Brooklyn transplants and the like. This was about the time he started looking like an Eddie Vedder tribute act.

Success was varied, but Fetterman was having a go, and he was put on the ticket for lieutenant governor in 2018, seemingly on the road to the Senate. With the contest well underway this year, he was hit by a stroke, which knocked him out for months but did not end his candidacy. Whether it should have is another question, but by then Fetterman’s support base — the left of the Pennsylvania party, tied to the Bernie Sanders forces — were not going to let their best chance go. Fetterman stayed on the ticket and, about six weeks ago, fully rejoined the race, making a feature of his struggle against adversity.

So how did he look that Tuesday night on the TV in Rookies, the party faithful gathered around? The answer, sadly, was pitiful — and everyone knew it. In the weeks of negotiation for the debate, both sides had agreed that he would be able to see closed captioning of the questions, to compensate for “auditory processing issues”, and he had found a slew of doctors willing to attest that communication problems were not a measure of cognitive decline.

Dr Oz wasn’t one of them, of course; indeed (and this is a measure of where this country is at now), his campaign Trump-trolled Fetterman throughout the campaign, putting out press releases saying things like “if John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, he wouldn’t be in this mess now”, which is quite extraordinary in not being extraordinary at all.

Trouble was, as became clear through the debate, it looked as if something very like cognitive impairment had set in, because the dude just wasn’t up to it. Dr Oz ran rings around him, like a grand bazaar huckster, framing him as a trust fund boy and as a lefty soft on crime, which his actions actually did much to reduce in Braddock.

Mind you, the wider Fetterman campaign has given no quarter, with sinister orange-and-black quickie ads on all channels asking “why did Dr Oz kill so many puppies?” Say what now, you may go, shocked out of your Friends rerun stupor, as stock footage of dogs being gassed plays. Oz, it turns out, was involved in legit medical research decades ago, when animal rights were not quite what they were, and despite the fact that they contributed to his development of artificial heart valves that have saved thousands of people (who probably never ate a vegetable either), the puppy-killer thing is really damaging him.

So Team Fetterman can get the cheap shots in — candidate Fetterman, well, not so much. Oz, having run to the right to get Trump’s endorsement, now has to stay there. “I don’t want a minimum wage to be $15 an hour,” he proclaimed. “I want it to be higher! But not through government! Through the market and our great ideas!” The obvious riposte was that if the market set it, the current, penurious US$7.25 minimum wage would be lower still, much lower, but Fetterman couldn’t get to it. He just couldn’t string ideas together. “I, uh, support the minimum… we need $15,” he said again, and that was it.

Oz’s greatest wound was a self-inflicted one, when he opposed a federal law protecting abortion. “I don’t want the federal government in there! This should be a question for a woman, her doctor and state local officials”. Given Americans vote for every state official, water commission chair, and county maintenance officer, it gave the mental picture that along with a woman in extremis, a doctor, and nurse, Super Mario would also be in the procedure room. Team Fetterman had an ad out within an hour.

The crowd at Rookies put on a brave face — “look, a lot of people are going to look at Oz and go, I just don’t like that guy”, one tired white guy drawled from the corner of his mouth — but it was disconcerting, really, because there was a genuine sense that even his supporters had been sold a lab pup. Could this dude really handle the vast complexities of Senate life? Most of the job is being able to synthesise huge amounts of material, make solid decisions, and, well, speak on your feet. Good thing that the candidate has got that one nailed!

Mind you, progressive Twitter came to the “rescue” with angry tweets to the tune of “How dare you be ableist about Fetterman’s candidacy! #shame”. This was impressively ultra, next-level progressivism: not the defence that Fetterman was unimpaired but that even if he was, it should play no part in considerations.

How was this going to play with the general public? The breakfast-show consensus was that this would sink Fetterman utterly. By the morning shows, this was turning. Oz was so slick, smarmy and superior — and doesn’t even live in Pennsylvania, being just across the border in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s one good joke: “he keeps saying I’m Bernie Sanders, he should pretend to live in Vermont and run against Bernie there”.) Fetterman was honest and courageous, and as a shambling hulk of a man stumbling inarticulately through difficult questions, someone most Pennsylvanians could identify with. Well, I get that. But the stroke, etc has damaged that part of Fetterman’s appeal.

He now has, as do many Democrat candidates, a sort of Hunger Games vibe about him, as if he is part of a decadent ruling clique marked out by their strange clothes and debilitating diseases. Pelosi, Arizona governor candidate Katie Hobbs, embalmed-tennis-pro Florida governor candidate Charlie Crist… there’s a very Hapsburg sense of decay and decline about the Democrats. Fetterman wasn’t part of that, but now he needs a digital display board to understand questions put to him.

What did uncommitted people who saw the thing think? Well, I couldn’t find one. Questioning about 15 or so — bothering people over breakfast about their politics, there’s a glamorous part of the job — no one had seen it, half of them didn’t know it was on, etc, etc.

What did the faithful think the public would think at Rookies? “Well, I don’t know, man …” one young white kid said. He was tall, had long hair and Walmart jeans, a strong basement-dweller-dropped-out-of-Rutgers-rethinking-his-direction vibe.

“But you’ve been campaigning.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve spent days delivering yard signs…”

“So what do people think?”

He looked at me with immense tiredness. “It’s just get out the vote now, man. Everyone’s decided. It’s all just get out the vote…” The tables were cleared of half-eaten, immense, stroke-inducing Philly cheesesteak subs, and the TVs all switched back to the sports. Sinister, puppy-killing, diet-pill TV doctor versus grungy Lurch. Don’t say you never get a choice in the endless debate watch.