So back in 2022 in Current Affairs magazine, we warned that the latest cool Democrat was showing

some worrying signs of being pretty unprincipled and disappointing.

That was Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman, who had once positioned himself as a Bernie Sanders-style progressive.

He was running a campaign at the time that heavily featured zingy social media content.

Federman relentlessly trolled his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, for being a carpetbagger without

roots in the state.

The rude, crude social media strategy

attracted a lot of attention with the New York Times

commenting that Federman had a towel-snapping virtual campaign

of sassy online memes.

And the Daily Beast asking,

could John Federman shitpost his way to the Senate?

Now, it turned out the answer to that question was yes.

But what I wrote for current affairs during the campaign was that memes are no substitute

for clear, authentic, progressive politics.

And Fetterman was beginning to seem like he cared more about

humiliating Dr. Oz than about bringing people good health care or ending poverty. Fetterman

distanced himself from the word progressive, and he was troublingly sympathetic to Israel's

apartheid state.

So much of the messaging coming out of the Federman campaign was just jibes about Oz's residency,

and I argued at the time that it was a serious problem that Democrats don't have a clear message

on things that matter to people.

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