Did Snooki, Little Steven help save the Earth? | Will Bunch Newsletter

The day is finally here. My book — After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — And How to Fix It — officially drops today. But right now I want to look ahead just over two weeks, to a related big day.

You can now register to attend the Will Bunch Culture Club event where we’re going to talk about the book, what’s wrong (or right) with college today, and why whether or not one holds a bachelor’s degree affects how they vote. It’s an online Inquirer Live forum, and it takes place on Wednesday, Aug. 17, at 4:15 p.m. The moderator is The Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning higher-ed reporter Susan Snyder; she’ll be asking me questions and so can you. Of course, the conceit of the Will Bunch Culture Club is that hopefully you’re reading the book, which is now out so you can download it instantly onto your Kindle, or to your phone as an audiobook.

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OK, I know this is going to sound a little strange, but over the last few days I’ve actually been wondering if New Jersey’s notorious “Snooki” from that old-school MTV reality-show Jersey Shore and the great “Little Steven” Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band with a pit stop at The Sopranos, have played a bit part in saving our planet from extinction.

Hear me out on this one, OK?

If you follow politics — especially in the venue where the truly obsessed spend far too much of our day, which is Twitter then you sort of know where I’m going with this. In recent weeks, Snooki (real name: Nicole Polizzi) and Van Zandt recorded short videos for Pennsylvania Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman around the same theme: That Fetterman’s GOP rival Mehmet Oz is every bit as “Joisey” as diners, refinery stench ... and themselves.

“I heard that you moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to look for a new job, and personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to leave Jersey, because it’s like, the best place ever, and we’re all hot messes,” Polizzi says in the video. Although shared far and wide by the Fetterman campaign, the Snooki/Oz video first dropped on the website Cameo, where the reality TV icon offers to film an individualized greeting for as little as $300. It’s been speculated, hilariously, that Snooki taped this not even knowing who “Mehmet” is.

Of course, Fetterman’s point is ... does anyone know who Mehmet Oz, celebrity TV doctor, really is? Especially in Pennsylvania, the state where Oz — whose primary residence for years has been a mansion in North Jersey — had only loose ties before moving in with his Montgomery County in-laws (then buying a house nearby) to launch his bid for an open Senate seat.

Since the general election lineup was set, Fetterman — a lifelong Pennsylvanian and currently its lieutenant governor — has slammed Oz again and again as a New Jersey carpetbagger who is equivalent to other Garden State made-for-TV celebrities like Snooki, and not a trusted political figure with any real track record.

And like a nightclub comedian hammering a bit again and again, Fetterman will not let up, so we’ve had Little Steven — “Nobody wants to see you get embarrassed ... So come on back to Jersey where you belong” — and we’ve had a plane flying a “Welcome Home Oz” banner over packed shore beaches and now even a Fetterman-launched petition to elect Oz to the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Because your opponent can’t make any headway on “the issues” if voters think he’s a phony.

The conventional wisdom was that it was Fetterman who had the bad hand in this election — because problems like high inflation and President Biden’s low approval rating were supposed to make 2022 a GOP year. And that was before Fetterman suffered a serious stroke in May that has kept him off the campaign trail so that he can fully recuperate.

The conventional wisdom, as so often the case, has been wrong. Fetterman opened a lead in the polls and continues to expand it — up to an 11-point margin over Oz in the most recent Fox News survey. The strong chance of Fetterman grabbing a seat currently held by Republican Pat Toomey, and weak GOP candidates elsewhere, like the seriously out-of-his-league Herschel Walker in Georgia, suddenly has prediction websites like fivethirtyeight.com now favoring the Democrats to keep their narrow hold on the Senate — and maybe even expand it by a seat or two.

Which is where we pivot to the critical issue of climate change, and the current decider in Washington: West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Over the course of the Biden administration, the business-friendly coal millionaire Manchin has used his leverage as the 50th vote to whittle down the president’s ambitious domestic agenda. Just two weeks ago, it was widely reported that Manchin had used that veto to kill critical new spending to curb greenhouse-gas pollution.

Then came last week’s stunning reversal. Manchin said he’d reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to support a sweeping climate agenda — $369 billion for an array of programs that would speed the development of electric cars and wind and solar energy aimed at helping the United States achieve a 40% reduction in carbon emissions from 2005 to 2030. Of course, Manchin got some perks for West Virginia and other pet items in the bill, but even usually cynical environmentalists have hailed the deal.

Coincidentally, the deal was announced almost the same time that fivethirtyeight.com changed its forecast to Democratic Senate control in 2023. But was it a coincidence? Earlier this summer, Manchin probably thought that not only was he channeling the national zeitgeist in blocking Biden’s agenda, but he was also getting himself on the good side of Senate GOP leader and climate denialist Mitch McConnell, anticipating when the GOP would surely be back in power.

But with Fetterman’s demolition of Oz looking to tip the scale the other way, Manchin ended up cutting a deal with Schumer instead of doing McConnell’s bidding. Remember, there is no policy goal for Manchin that is more important than retaining his status as the most important person in Washington. A climate deal will make sure he’s in good with Schumer and his fellow Democrats, to continue acting as a Beltway power broker through 2024.

Or, consider this: If Fetterman wins and one or two upstart Democrats — say, Tim Ryan in Ohio or Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin — can do the same, the progressive wing would have been poised to end the filibuster and enact climate legislation, regardless of whether Manchin was in on the plan. Whatever happens in November, the West Virginian seems to have gambled that he’ll never have more clout on Capitol Hill than he does now, and so he raced to cut a deal on his terms.

I don’t care how often Manchin gets booked on the Sunday talk shows, but I do care about the air that my (hypothetical) grandchildren will breathe, and I’m delighted by the recent turn of events. I never thought I’d say this, but ... thanks, Snooki!

Question: Hi Will-thoughts on Liz Cheney running for President? Obviously highly doubtful on the Republican ticket, but if she loses in Wyoming, could she run as an independent? — Via Andrew Spiegler (@aspiegler11) on Twitter

Answer: Andrew, I have two thoughts. First, I think the remarkable work that Cheney has performed on the House Jan. 6 Committee in laser-focusing the nation on the crimes and misdemeanors of her nemesis Donald Trump will some day merit a statue in Washington — but not a ticket to the White House. Not with her retrograde views on so many other issues that matter to Americans, from reproductive rights to torture to climate change. Second, I’ll say it again: the risk of third-party candidates helping Trump in a general election — which is exactly how he came to power in 2016 — is far too great. Let’s hope for a one-on-one race in 2024.

The Democrats have increasingly become the party of the college-educated in America. There are a couple of big problems with this. For one thing, only 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and 37% doesn’t win many elections, as Mehmet Oz seems poised to find out in November. What’s worse, the elite-university-grad campaign consultant class of the Democratic Party is way too clever for its own good. The whiz kids charged with keeping Democrats afloat in the 2022 midterms have hit on the brilliantly stupid strategy of aiding the most extreme right-wing candidates in GOP primaries, convinced that a wise and just and not at all bitter and resentful electorate will surely reject these Republican wingnuts in the general election. In May, I wrote about the folly of Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro spending millions to boost the name of state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a leader of anti-democratic Christian nationalism. But that was just the beginning.

It’s been reported Democrats have burned a whopping $44 million in five states to boost the right-wing extremists they are convinced are the easiest to beat in November. In maybe the most egregious example, the party’s House campaign arm has spent about $300,000 aimed at taking down western Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, who stuck his neck out politically as one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over Jan. 6. The Democratic ads spotlight Trump’s endorsement of John Gibbs, a believer in the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud. Do these consultants not remember how Hillary Clinton salivated over opposing Trump in 2016? How’d that turn out? But worse, Democrats can’t seriously claim that modern Republicanism is a threat to democracy — it is, by the way — when they play footsie with these whackadoodles. This project would earn an “F” in both political science and in chemistry, because it’s going to blow up in the Democrats’ faces.