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How the Phillies' loss in the World Series may have put Fetterman over the top [1]

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Date: 2022-11-09

Before you dismiss the following out of hand, you need to appreciate something about Philadelphians. They don’t just love their sports teams, they live their sports teams. They breathe them 24-7, they go to sleep with them, they wake up with them, and for breakfast they pour their sports’ teams milk into their Cheerios, take what’s left in the bowl and dump it over their heads so it stays with them the rest of the day. When the Eagles or the Phillies lose a critical, life-or-death championship game, a dark pall of depression settles over the city, a gnawing, nameless angst that doesn’t go away. It infects everyone’s mood. Conversely, when they win — such as when the Eagles won the Super Bowl, for instance -- the city is suddenly bursting with good will, people walk around with silly, inexplicable grins and spontaneously, wordlessly hug strangers in the middle of the street. This actually happens, and to a great extend the phenomenon extends out to people living in the immediate suburbs, which, incidentally comprise the four counties that, along with Philadelphia, generally decide the course of every statewide Pennsylvania election.

When the Phillies amazingly made it into the World Series this year, the town was beyond ecstatic. Hundreds of thousands of people stayed up late nights only to drag themselves into the office the next morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted, but happy. Republicans knew that Philadelphians’ eyes would be glued to their TV screens for five, six, maybe seven nights, so they leaped to air the most despicable ads against John Fetterman that you could imagine, tying him in grainy footage to a fantasy hellscape of urban crime, accusing him of supporting murders and drug dealers, even calling him a worthless sloth who’d who lived with his mother til the age of 49 and never worked a day in his life. The “crime” ads were the worst of all, because while Philly has its share of crime it is nothing remotely like the Hieronymous Boschian hell suggested in those ads. In fact it’s a pretty safe and pleasant place. Towards the end, the Republicans doubled down; they started running ads mocking his speech difficulties that had plagued Fetterman in the “debate,” even when it was painfully obvious that those difficulties arose from a severe stroke.

Night after night, inning after inning these ads ran, by Stephen Miller’s “Citizens for Sanity” and by dark money PACS funding Oz’s campaign. Paid for by billions of dollars of fossil fuel and corporate money, they were ubiquitous, impossible to avoid. Anyone watching the games grew to hate these ads because they were intrusive, ugly, and just plain nasty. Meanwhile the Phillies won the opener in Houston, and the opener in Philadelphia, setting up a weird juxtaposition between these constant feel-bad ads and the Phillies’ amazing success.

Then things started to turn south for the Phils. Houston’s deep pitching reserves finally began to catch up, stymieing their best hitters. Game by game, the series slipped away despite their heroic stand (But at the same time it was still a little hard to totally, absolutely, and unconditionally hate a team coached by the legendary Dusty Baker). But losing sets up an unusual emotional dichotomy for Philadelphians, who are well-known for their rabid ferocity against opposing teams. When the final moment came, the last out in the top of the ninth in Houston, a palpable sense of sorrow had taken hold, leaving a gaping emptiness in the city’s soul that could not even be assuaged by the Eagles’ equally miraculous, spotless season. And as I pointed out above, the effects of this letdown were keenly felt. And interestingly enough, Fetterman finally began running very positive ads around that time, ads where he spoke directly into the camera and talked about his family a lot.

Then a few days later, it was suddenly time to vote in a major election. Philadelphians, together with their brethren and sistren in the suburbs, now had some way of channeling their still-felt disappointment. But Philadelphians love an underdog: the Phillies were underdogs, the Eagles always seem to be underdogs, the Sixers, the Union and the Flyers … well, you get the idea. Philadelphians have been conditioned for decades to suffer disappointment by their teams, but they always come back to support them. Somewhere in the deep recesses of their memories I think they recalled how bad and nasty the Oz ads had been, beating up on a guy laid low through no fault of his own by a stroke. In their innermost, tenuous recesses of consciousness they’d formed, over the course of the World Series, a tacit, unspoken link between those ads and their eventual disappointment, a disappointment that had yet to find its outlet and release.

The election gave them an opportunity for that release. Who were they going to take their anger and disappointment out on? Not the guy with the stroke, the underdog in their minds. No, they were going to take it out on the guy who made them feel so bad during the emotional roller coaster of having their hopes stoked, and then sadly dashed: Mehmet Oz.

They were going to vote for Fetterman, and against that other guy. And that’s exactly what they did. It was a purely Philadelphia thing.

You may ask, well, what if the Phillies had won? And the truth is, I’m not sure. But that’s a metaphysical, hypothetical question that we really don’t need to explore right now, isn’t it?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/9/2134853/-How-the-Phillies-loss-in-the-World-Series-may-have-put-Fetterman-over-the-top

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