Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in the state, said on Tuesday that his stroke earlier this year and ongoing recovery won’t “have an impact” on his ability to serve if elected.
“I don’t think it’s going to have an impact,” Fetterman told NBC News in an interview, though he did not provide details. “I feel like I’m gonna get better and better — every day. And by January, I’m going [to] be, you know, much better. And [Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet] Oz is still going to be a fraud.”
As an example of the lingering side effects of the stroke, Fetterman said that he utilizes closed-captioning during interviews and public appearances due to issues with his hearing.
“I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear. So I use captioning so I’m able to see what you’re saying on the captioning,” Fetterman said.
“It changes everything,” he added when asked about how recovering has affected his life. “Everything about it is changed.”
Fetterman went on to say, “But it gets much, much better where I take in a lot. But to be precise, I use captioning, so that’s really … the major challenge. And every now and then I’ll miss a word. Every now and then. Or sometimes I’ll maybe mush two words together. But as long as I have captioning, I’m able to understand exactly what’s being asked.”
NBC notes that the lieutenant governor sometimes stuttered or mispronounced words. At one point, Fetterman struggled to pronounce the word “empathetic,” and noted this as an example of the challenges he’s experiencing, though he said that actually thinking of the word he wants to say is not “hard.”
He said, “It was just about having to be thinking … slower — to just understand and that sometimes that’s kind of the processing that happens.”
Fetterman said of his campaign, “I feel like we have been very transparent in a lot of different ways” when it comes to his stroke and subsequent recovery process. “When our doctor has already given a letter saying that I’m able to serve and to be running. And then I think there’s — you can’t be any more transparent than standing up on a stage with 3,000 people and having a speech without a teleprompter and just being — and putting everything and yourself out there like that. I think that’s as transparent as everyone in Pennsylvania can see.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.