The Left's Answer to Trump Is 6 Foot 8 and Wears Shorts in February

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Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman confirmed that if he wins the open US Senate race in Pennsylvania, Democrats will kill the filibuster.

BRADDOCK, Pa.—John Fetterman didn’t grow up with anyone who had a biker-bar bouncer’s chin beard or who wore work shirts and shorts in February. He didn’t grow up committed to LGBTQ rights and legalizing marijuana and a living wage. The Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate didn’t grow up dreaming of being a senator, or expecting to fail an exercise at Harvard’s Kennedy School because he refused to present a solution for how best to cut Social Security. He certainly didn’t anticipate serving as a stand-in for the Big Show when the wrestler made an appearance here (though at 6 foot 8, Fetterman is actually a few inches taller than he is). Fetterman has a weird life. He chose it because of the very different life he was born into.

Fetterman grew up four hours away from Braddock, in York, Pennsylvania. His father, an insurance salesman turned executive, and his mother, who cared for Fetterman and his brother while they were young and later helped her husband at the business, covered the bulk of Fetterman’s expenses during the 14 years he served as mayor of Braddock—a job that comes with a monthly salary of about $150.

Now that Fetterman’s the front-runner in a Senate race that’s sure to be one of the biggest of 2022, skeptics and rivals are looking for his vulnerabilities. The obvious angle of attack, one that some of his foes have landed on already: What if Fetterman’s not the real deal? What if he’s just a trust-fund kid playing dress-up?

“I was an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy to two 19-year-olds that were casually dating, and my father was a union grocery worker at the ShopRite—and that’s what allowed my family to survive while he went to college,” Fetterman told me recently, sitting at home in Braddock. “I got lucky. The fact that, 52 years later, they are still together is a testament to just my good fortune, because statistically or actuarially or whatever, my life very likely would have turned out much differently. So I have always felt part of that duty and obligation to want to pay that forward and to contribute. And that was one of the deciding factors that brought me to Braddock. So it’s an unusual criticism where somebody would say, ‘He’s not from here.’ I’m like, ‘Well, of course I’m not.’”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/john-fetterman-senate-pennsylvania-democrat/618257/