[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and it's good to have you with us.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: All aboard the midterm train. Our next stop, Pennsylvania, sight of one of the nation's most competitive US Senate contests.

John Fetterman: "I'm going to be a lot better in January, but he's going to still be a fraud."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, that's Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic nominee for the US Senate, John Fetterman. He's the tattooed former mayor of a steel town. He was talking there with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell earlier this week and referring to his opponent, Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Mehmet Oz: "John Fetterman has been a no-show his whole life."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Dr. Oz is a retired surgeon and a former host of a daytime talk show. A show that advanced unproven products and health theories that many in the medical community have deemed dangerous. This race is pivotal because the seat could determine control of the Senate. At the height of the primary in May--

Speaker 4: "Current lieutenant governor and candidate in this race, John Fetterman, is in the hospital and will stay there through at least tomorrow, Election Night. Yesterday he announced that he went to the hospital Friday, where doctors told him he suffered a stroke caused by a blood clot from atrial fibrillation or A-fib."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Despite the stroke, Fetterman won the Democratic primary contest. During the summer months, Fetterman limited his in-person campaigning as he recovered. This week, Fetterman spoke to NBC for his first in-person interview since the stroke. He used a closed captioning tool because he's been dealing with difficulties in processing sounds quickly. It's a common after-effect of strokes.

John Fetterman: "I always thought I was pretty empathetic. I think I was very, excuse me, empathetic. Yes, that's an example of the stroke - empathetic. I always thought I was very empathetic before having a stroke. But now, after having that stroke, I really understand much more kind of the challenges that Americans have day in and day out."

Melissa Harris-Perry: While at times during the interview Fetterman struggled for a word, neurologists have noted that the stroke hasn't appeared to affect his cognitive functioning. Still, since the lieutenant governor's stroke in May, Dr. Oz's campaign has made it central to their messaging. Messaging that's not just oppositional, but often personal.

Speaker 5: "Rachel Tripp, Oz's senior communications advisor, released a statement to Insider that reads this way. 'If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn't have had a major stroke and wouldn't be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.'"

Melissa Harris-Perry: In her latest piece for New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister writes about the ways that the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race has become a commentary on American anxieties about strength, manhood, and masculinity. With me now is Rebecca Traister. Thanks for coming back on The Takeaway.

Rebecca Traister: I'm always happy to be here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. What is it that the US Senate race in Pennsylvania is teaching us about manhood and masculinity?

Rebecca Traister: [laughs] Well, it's very interesting. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania has a really bleak history of electing only white men, so far, to both of its Senate seats and as governor. It's been a buffet of white men in Pennsylvania at a statewide level. I was really interested in this race in part because you have in Fetterman an example of this. This guy is a 6 foot 8 white man who wears hoodies and shorts and has been treated for years by the political press as an oddity, mostly just because of the shorts.

I always read these profiles of like, "Pennsylvania's never seen anything like this guy," and I'm like, "You've never met a shorts guy before?"

[laughter]

Rebecca Traister: It's really something about the limits of the beltway imagination. Part of the appeal, I think, of a candidate like Fetterman is the notion that he can speak to a strain of white voters that the Democratic Party has been bleeding to the increasingly radical Republican Party for years, and that Fetterman can present himself as one of them. Part of that is by projecting a version of big, tough white masculinity.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That kind of muscular Democrat. The sort of union guy. When I think about Joe Biden for a long time being Amtrak Joe, that he's working class, but as an older gentleman he no longer has, again, that muscularity, that vitality. Of course, the stroke impacts that.

Rebecca Traister: Right. Well, the stroke impacts that. It didn't necessarily have to. Oz and his campaign really seized on it. That sound bite that you played of the Rachel Tripp comment that was made in August, at first after the stroke, Oz, as a literal medical doctor-- Before he was a TV doctor, Dr. Oz, he's a real doctor. He took initially the humane and high road, which is like wishing him a speedy recovery and saying lots of people have strokes. People recover from strokes.

Then in August, I think in part because John Fetterman - and I write about this in my piece - actually found a way to communicate very effectively through his period of initial convalescence when he couldn't be at rallies and doing public events. His campaign did a very effective set of Twitter burns and online social media campaign against Dr. Oz. One of the things I reported is that John Fetterman himself was behind that. Clearly finding a way that he could communicate that didn't require the in-person auditory processing and conversational stuff that he was struggling to get through at the very beginning.

He'd waged this really effective campaign against Oz, and in August, the Oz campaign turns ugly with that comment. They really start attacking him in ways that are meant to physically diminish. To convey that he is enfeebled. To focus on his weight, that comment about "Eat your vegetables." It was interesting because it was happening at exactly the moment that John Fetterman began to reemerge in public. Right?

Melissa Harris-Perry: I can't believe I'm about to say this. I want to be really fair though here. Fetterman also was doing some meanness. There's this moment when Dr. Oz is in the grocery store. He's having this moment about inflation, and-- Just hold on a second. Let's listen to John Fetterman here.

John Fetterman: "In PA we call this a veggie tray, and if this looks like anything other than a veggie tray to you then I am not your candidate."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why the veggie tray comment?

Rebecca Traister: [laughs] That was some self-inflicted damage by Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz had done a video about inflation and the price of what he called crudité. First of all, he'd walked into a Pennsylvania grocery store called Redner's, and he had gotten it confused with another chain called Wegmans. In this video that his campaign had put out, he'd called it a Wegners, getting the name of both chains wrong. Then he had done this bonkers video about the price of crudité for his wife where he'd picked out asparagus and talked about how expensive the asparagus, the guacamole was, and that was before you paid for tequila. It was a little bit of a cell phone as the kids say.

Fetterman's campaign and Fetterman himself did take a pretty scathingly funny approach. They used the social media language of vicious teasing. Now, I talked to Fetterman for my piece about what he and everybody in his campaign maintained was a very strict line between funny and mean. You are clearly hearing some meanness. I think they would all say, "Look, this was self-inflicted damage." He was putting this stuff out. A lot of what they were hitting Oz on was the fact that until extremely recently he's actually lived in New Jersey in an incredibly large mansion that People magazine has done spreads about, and he's running for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania?

A lot of what Fetterman told me is we used his own material, and that vegetable video is an example of it. Oz put that video out there while running for Senate in Pennsylvania, in which he gets the name of Pennsylvania grocery stores wrong.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. If we've got one guy saying, "Look, I'm the real man," Fetterman, "I'm the real man because I call these vegetables," and we've got the other one saying, "This guy is not a real man because he's too weak to keep himself from having a stroke," both of which are very odd ways of describing manhood. I get the cultural touchpoints that they're poking on, but I guess I'm wondering, does it move us away from talking about where Fetterman and Oz stand on the fundamentals that affect the voters of Pennsylvania?

Rebecca Traister: Yes. It's really interesting because writing this piece was so much about the two characters. Both of the ways in which they were fighting against each other. The effectiveness of Fetterman's message about Oz living in New Jersey wasn't really about policy. Now, I would argue that it is a relevant question in terms of where do you live? Do you know the state that you are going to represent in the United States Senate? It is not necessarily about their differences on abortion, minimum wage, marijuana legalization, labor, all kinds of things.

There are really stark differences, but it's absolutely become a campaign of personality and drawing each other as cartoons in some ways.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. In that cartoonism, which maybe also makes sense in a certain way when we think about where we are in American politics at this moment, I'm wondering-- Again, if there's one more thing that I really want you to tease out for me, isn't it reasonable to ask whether someone who's had a major health event is in fact physically and cognitively capable of representing the people he's seeking to represent?

Rebecca Traister: Yes. I think it's absolutely reasonable to ask, but the interesting thing for me reporting on this is that the arc of his recovery became very clear to me as soon as I started focusing on it. When I first went to a Fetterman rally, he had just begun to do events in public, and the first couple he'd seemed a little shaky actually. There had been a lot of derisive videos circulating on Twitter of him getting words tangled.

Watching him over the course of September was really pretty remarkable because every week in every rally I saw him improve. That was something that was really visible, an arc of recovery, which is not to say that the communication is perfect. You can tell from the interviews that he's doing that he continues to miss words. The other thing is that while his campaign has come in for a lot of criticism, and it's actually the model laid down in that mean "vegetables" thing - the mean vegetable comment about the idea that he's somehow lying about his health - the legitimate press has really taken off with that.

In fact, his campaign has revealed a lot about his medical history, including the fact that he got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation five years ago and then didn't follow up with a doctor. That's something they've been very, very frank about. They've been very frank about all of the conditions that led to his stroke and his own behaviors, including not taking the medicine he was supposed to take and not following up with his doctor.

Yes, I think it's absolutely fair to want to get answers about a candidate's physical condition, but I also think there's been a lot of information provided about his physical condition. I don't really have questions, as somebody who's reported on it, having interviewed him, talked to him, talked to doctors as I did when I was reporting my piece about whether or not this was typical recovery, and being told over and over again that yes, it was. To me, it seemed pretty transparent.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We've talked a lot about masculinity. What does his race also potentially tell us about race?

Rebecca Traister: Well, it's fascinating because as soon as the Oz campaign began to really dig in on this notion of weakness, which again might have been a difficult prospect when you're talking about a 6 foot 8, 270-pound white man in a hoodie, but because of the stroke there was this opening for them to cast him as enfeebled, and in some way infantilized. "Eat your vegetables." Well, that begins to go towards softness, and then it can be connected imaginatively to some work that Fetterman was very public about.

As lieutenant governor, he headed up the Pardons Board, where he very publicly fought for the commutations of sentences that he and a board of people deemed were overlong or inappropriate. He was very public about this work during the time that he's been lieutenant governor in Pennsylvania.

The Oz campaign specifically homed in on two brothers, the Horton brothers, who unfortunately share a last name with William Horton who was made such an issue in Michael Dukakis's campaign. They began to run on this soft-on-crime message. The Horton brothers had been imprisoned for 27 years for a murder that it is widely agreed they were wrongly imprisoned for and had had pristine records. There's a short documentary about them that I really recommended. It just won an Emmy a couple of weeks ago. Fetterman had fought really hard for them to get out of jail. In fact, after they got out of jail, hired them to work on his campaign.

The Oz campaign started hitting Fetterman hard for being-- and this is all Oz's spokesperson said to me repeatedly was, "Fetterman is pro-murderer, pro-murderer, pro-murderer," they started running this incredibly dog-whistling campaign. The Horton brothers are Black, talking about Fetterman as soft on crime. We know from the history of talking about candidates as soft on crime, talking about Democrats as soft on crime, that this is coded. It is simultaneously feminizing and racialized language to suggest and insinuate that the Democratic Party fundamentally is especially using the Horton brothers. Is somehow on the side of crime that is coded as Black.

To add to that, you have Newt Gingrich talking on television about how Fetterman's tattoos-- he has a series of tattoos, some of which are actually the dates of death for people from the town of Braddock where he was mayor; who were murdered while he was mayor. Newt Gingrich talking about how he believed his tattoos were a signal to the Crips? It's remarkable to see often how the feminization and the racializing language can go hand in hand. Even by making connections with the Crips, you're also doing a hyper-masculinized kind of racist framing, but the soft-on-crime is the feminizing racist framing. They're just throwing it all at this enormous white man.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca Traister is writer-at-large for New York Magazine, and you've got to read, you've got to read this latest piece. Rebecca, it's always great to have you with us.

Rebecca Traister: It is always great to talk to you, Melissa.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.