Yesterday, Salena Zito quoted a Pennsylvania voter (and Gertrude Stein) in describing John Fetterman on the campaign trail — “there’s no there there.” We’ll get back to that point, but a few hours after publishing her column, the Democrat running for the open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania appeared eager to prove Salena’s point. Either Fetterman himself or his campaign tried to publish a meme painting Mehmet Oz as a quack and a carpetbagger, and, well …

Oh my. This is much worse than the unauthorized Simpsons use Karen reported earlier:

It’s october 3rd. pic.twitter.com/o9vJlMFdHI

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) October 3, 2022

It’s nice to see Fetterman employing middle-school kids to create his campaign arguments. I wonder, however, whether the campaign is obeying the child labor laws clearly involved in this effort.

Seriously, however, calling this “amateur hour” might insult actual amateurs. Not only does this lack any sort of wit necessary for memeing, the message itself is only barely coherent and comes across as random ad hominems. And the artwork is simply terrible — badly produced by people who have no clue how to operate Photoshop, and who clearly don’t give a rat’s ass about how they perform their jobs.

Maybe Team Fetterman would be better advised to stop memeing and start engaging with voters and debates with Mehmet Oz. They clearly don’t want to do that, because as Salena reported yesterday, Fetterman’s stroke has left him incapable of those tasks, or of even addressing the issues that matter most to voters in Pennsylvania:

Fetterman then took the stage to the Styx 1979 hit song “Renegade,” waving a Steelers’ Terrible Towel. He started making his pitch to his faithful followers. “I’m overwhelmed,” he said. “I’m overwhelmed. … Franco Harris? That’s pretty Western Pennsylvania, right? What’s the opposite of Western Pennsylvania?”

He had the answer for that one: “Dr. Oz,” referring to his Republican opponent.

“Now,” he continued, “let me ask you a question. How many of you are going to want to tailgate with Dr. Oz?”

Fetterman went on with several stumbles over the next 10 minutes. He talked about sandwiches, salads, french fries on salads, more salads, how Dr. Oz is rooting for him to stay sick, and his most reliable tropes: crudites and protecting marriage equality. He said that Oz wanted to ban abortion with no exceptions and that he reduced crime while mayor of the borough of Braddock.

Then, he left the stage.

It speaks volumes that none of the speakers, including Fetterman himself, addressed the issues that polls show to be of utmost importance to the voters in this state — inflation, increasing crime, and the drug epidemic.

And even Democrats have begun to notice that, especially while Oz is heavily engaging in retail politicking throughout the Keystone State. One Democrat tells Salena that he hasn’t changed to Oz, but he’s not going to vote for Fetterman either:

None of the questions that came to Oz in any of those daylong events was easy, nor were the ad hoc questions posed to him when he visited the crime-ravaged Kensington neighborhood of Philly last week. But he showed up, felt the frustration, listened, and learned at the same time Fetterman was placing a meme on Twitter showing a stick image of himself kicking the balls of D.C.

One Allegheny County Democrat, frustrated with the lack of any “meat on the bones” of Fetterman’s rhetoric, said he wouldn’t vote for Oz, “but I also won’t vote for Fetterman. I’ll just leave that blank. There is no there there.”

It’s becoming clear that Fetterman doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how he performs his job, either, or whether he can do it at all. Fetterman has become a stalking horse for Chuck Schumer and nothing more, a placeholder or proxy for Democrat leadership. Fetterman and his team figure they can coast to a win by zinging Oz from the sidelines, doing occasional rallies in which the candidate doesn’t address economic or crime issues, and let the media do the rest for them. And apparently, that’s what Fetterman plans to do in the Senate as well.

Perhaps that strategy could work, too. But if this is all the effort Fetterman and his team are willing to put into the campaign, the embarrassment may accelerate quickly as Election Day approaches.

Update: Fixed an erroneous reference in the first paragraph from Fetterman to Mehmet Oz.