The Fetterman Question

There may well be a reasonable explanation for it, but Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman did not appear to be able to handle things well at all during the debate with Mehmet Oz the other day. Coming off a stroke in May, questions are certainly left unanswered, the first and foremost being whether his campaign has been properly up front about his health.

Fetterman's health, of course, is paramount, and we should all be praying for his complete and quick recovery. Having a stroke is not his fault and we must acknowledge that. Still, someone in his campaign and/or personal life has some explaining to do. I don't think we were ever told the whole truth.

What galls me the most is that such apparent lack of transparency isn't unusual in political circles. The need for power trumps honesty all too often where politics and the desire to mold the world into a certain image rules all.

What's happening in Pennsylvania isn't new. President Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith and the White House staff hid Wilson's incapacitated condition from the public after he suffered a traumatic stroke in 1919; he should have stepped down or at least stepped back. But that would have meant a loss of political leverage at an important time in our history (World War I having just ended) and, well, those who crave power can't do that.

Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt by many accounts shouldn't have run for a fourth term in 1944. No less than Harry Truman remarked in August of that year than the President looked physically terrible. FDR certainly had his share of health problems. Yet that couldn't be made public. It would affect the power he held, and his ability to play God with history. 

When health becomes an issue for someone holding a public obligation, it is part of that obligation to step away from the pulpit precisely because staying might hurt themselves or the people they serve or propose to serve. Why, all too often, won't they? Simply because power, and ego, corrupts. It doesn't surprise me, but I am at least naive enough to be scandalized by it.