Dr. Oz Can’t Run from Who He Is

I’ve written relatively recently about how Dr. Oz is a, uh, less-than-ideal candidate for Republicans to run in a battleground state such as Pennsylvania. Last month, in response to this incredibly weird, maybe-even-a-little-bit-creepy cartoon attack ad, I wrote:

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate nominee in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, is flailing. He’s down by about eleven points in the polls, despite the fact that his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman — the goateed, heavyset, six-foot-eight-inch lieutenant governor of the state whose down-home, working-class public presentation is straight out of Pennsylvania central casting — was off the campaign trail for the past three months after suffering a stroke. (Fetterman held his first post-stroke public rally late last week.) Oz needs a course correction, and quickly. Whatever he’s doing right now clearly isn’t working.

Encouragingly, Fetterman’s lead over Oz appears to have shrunk somewhat — the same FiveThirtyEight poll aggregate that I cited as showing an eleven-point spread as of August 16 now shows Fetterman leading Oz by just over eight points. As Jim Geraghty reported this morning, the two most recent one-off polls have Fetterman’s lead down to four and five points, respectively. Some of that may have to do with the strikingly obvious fact, made more apparent by his return to public speaking events, that Fetterman is far from recovered from the effects of his stroke:

As Jim noted, “There is also reason to think that Fetterman’s refusal to debate is reawakening concerns about whether he’s really healthy enough to serve as a senator. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board declared today that the Democrat’s decision to dodge a debate legitimizes the critique that Fetterman is hiding how slowly he is recovering.”

With all that being said, all of the problems that have caused Dr. Oz to consistently trail Fetterman by wide margins over the course of the race remain — and while it may have closed some, a Fetterman average of +8 is still not great for our intrepid magic-weight-loss-pill-salesman-turned-Republican-Senate-hopeful. Part of that is at least partially because the kind of populist, workingman’s-Republican profile that tends to resonate in states such as Pennsylvania — an image that Oz, at various junctures, has attempted to cultivate — is just . . . not Oz. The latest example of this weakness is this video — leaked a couple of days ago from the left-wing PatriotTakes group — of a past speech that Oz delivered to the National Governors Association in which he expressed his belief that companies “shouldn’t hire smokers”:

In a follow-up clip, Oz adds that “One day, and I think this will be true for the state employees as well . . . they won’t be allowed to smoke.” 

I’m somewhat reluctant to give free media coverage to left-wing messaging groups such as PatriotTakes, which devotes most of its resources to digging up old clips of conservatives in an attempt to make them look bad. But this is important, as it pertains to the broader issues with Oz. Clips like the one depicting Oz arguing for nanny-state efforts to effectively relegate cigarette smokers to the status of second-class citizens are just going to feed into the Fetterman campaign’s attacks that Oz is an out-of-state elitist — attacks that are made all the more effective by Oz’s vague efforts to style himself as a populist outsider. The Republican’s recent surge in the polls is salutary; for all his cringeworthiness, Oz would obviously take better votes in the Senate than Fetterman, who’s staked out hard-left positions on a number of issues — but if he wants a shot at making it over the finish line, he’s going to need to find a more authentic message.

As the “don’t-hire-smokers” clips hammer home, Oz isn’t a working-class man of the people — he’s as elite (and even more importantly, elitist) as it gets. Voters aren’t stupid. He’d have a better shot explaining how he can best deliver on their priorities in line with a more honest accounting of who he is — see: Trump 2016’s “I’m so rich I can’t be bought,” my tax plan “is going to cost me a fortune,” etc. — than whatever he’s doing now.