Fetterman supplies the Senate's fiftieth vote for Republicans, calls losing that majority 'entirely possible.'

…(cont) Start on August twenty-eighth. Did the senator say, in his own words, that his party has what he called a "socialism problem"? He did, to The Hill, and he named two candidates while he said it — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Graham Platner, who'd already dropped out in Maine. The paper printed one more line in that same story, and I want to be careful here, because it wasn't something he said. It was something the paper noted about him, in its own voice: that he's now more popular back home with Republicans than with the people whose primary he'd need to win. I keep the two separate. A man's own words and what gets written about him are different pages, and I don't like mixing my pages.

Brendan Boyle, in writing, under his own name: a "lazy trust fund baby." Did Fetterman answer it? The clip I have doesn't say. What I have is the date, and the date is thirteen days before Senate Democrats sent Secretary Hegseth a letter asking for a cost breakdown on Iran — a letter every Democrat in that chamber signed except one.

Between those two dates, on a Wednesday, a video of the senator played at the Republican Party's own midterm convention. That part already ran in this paper once, so I won't read it back to you again. I'll just place it: after Boyle called him lazy, before the letter went out without him, before the vote that kept the war open.

Three weeks after Boyle's post, on September twenty-fifth, the vote happened. And two days after that — that Saturday, at a festival in Austin, Texas — Fetterman sat down with a television reporter and said something I copied down twice to make sure I had it right. "Entirely possible."

Now. Most nights I go out to the garage before bed just to look at the car, because the fan belt's been going two winters and I keep telling myself it'll hold. It only turns one way. Loosen it a quarter turn on one bolt and the whole thing goes slack — not just at the bolt you touched, at every wheel the belt drives, because the pulley doesn't know which bolt you meant to loosen, it only knows the belt is looser now. I think about that standing in the bank line, too, watching the teller post a deposit and a withdrawal on the same ledger. The number goes up on one line. It goes down on the other. It doesn't go up on both because you'd rather it did.

Excuse me — before you go, one more thing. The vote was forty-nine to fifty. The senator says his party could still take back that same fifty in November. I've got both of those written on the same page, in his own record: the vote he supplied, and the possibility he's since described. Is it the same fifty? I only ask because I wrote his own words down twice, and both times he called it entirely possible.