Time will tell but it seems like John Fetterman is good at politics.
He’s good at advancing up the ranks, he was good at winning a Senate race in a purple State, and he’s good at looking left wing while not pissing off reactionary interests. So in that respect, he’s great at politics, at least in the short run.
But let’s think about what his blood libel against migrants will do or contribute to over the next 10, 20, 50 years. Sure, telling regressive whites, who live that their woes can be blamed on Mexican and Central American, gives you a short-term boost with working class whites. But what about the future?
Mexican and Central American voters generally have a long memory and the level of betrayal is massive among a lot of politically active members of those groups.
That voting bloc also has a long memory on immigration (they aren’t single issue voters but immigration is a sensitive issue, for obvious reasons). Eventually, those elderly “blue dog” Dems will die off and be replaced by a younger, browner, more ideologically left cadre of voters (if Gen Z scares you politically, wait until an even more alienated and generation of iPad kids age into the franchise). At that point, American national politics will look like that of California right now.
And I’m sure you’re well aware that in the 1990’s, the massive increase in immigration to border States, forced Republican and Democratic Parties in those States to make choices. The Texas GOP choose a more pragmatic and humane approach. The California GOP choose to be maximally anti Latino immigrant. The California GOP today is less a party and more a giant, rent seeking, special interest group.
Stabbing migrants in the back could cause the national Democratic Party to meet that same fate over time. Moreover, the territorial integrity of the United States will be jeopardized. A declining empire, where vast swaths of it blame other racial and territorial tranches of fellow American citizens for their woes and that’s just the intra party strife? A civil war, dissolution, or the US existing in name only could be on the horizon, if we stretch out the timeline.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s look at Fetterman’s own career path. If he wants to become president, what bloc within the Democratic coalition would he have in a fight for a nomination? Obviously, he’s not getting many people who voted for Bernie. Can he win over black voters, I doubt it and even then it’s hard to see him winning with the margins that Obama, Clinton, and Biden got. His left wing cosplaying and somewhat pro union stances will scare away the affluent, white professional class who backed Biden and Obama. Could he get a majority of women’s votes? Again doubtful, there will be women running for office who can own the reproductive freedom issue.
So what would Fetterman have in 2028? Oh an on going beef with a powerful and ever growing constituency who won’t forget his betrayal of migrants. That’s what he’ll have.
So it really all depends on what timeframe we’re talking about in determining if he’s really good at politics or not.
