Sunday, January 9, 2022

Dr. Odd

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 06, 2022

 

Dr. Mehmet Oz may be the perfect Republican candidate for our time: a talk-show host and snake-oil peddler with a throbbing persecution complex, a Fox News hanger-on with a couple of weird religious connections and no real political experience. He is seeking to take over the Senate seat being vacated by Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, an old-school Reaganite conservative who pretty plainly has had enough and who in any case would have had a hard time getting himself reelected after voting to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial last February.

 

From Pat Toomey to Mehmet Oz — that would be a telling transition. There are some successions in office that really tell a story about the evolution of the Republican Party. Consider the arc of the Arizona Senate seat that went from Barry Goldwater to John McCain to Jon Kyl to Martha McSally to the Democrats, who may very well keep it for a generation. The line con­nect­ing Goldwater to McSally describes a Republican Party less and less sure of what it stands for and ultimately unable to hold on to power in a formerly rural state that has rapidly urbanized.

 

Pennsylvania offers a different kind of story: Arlen Specter, who long occupied the seat Oz seeks, was something like Michael Bloomberg, a northeastern big-city Democrat who ran for office as a Republican because the Democrats wouldn’t have him and the GOP offered an open path to power. Before that seat was held by Specter, it was held by Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican who was surprised in 1976 when Ronald Reagan proposed to choose him as his running mate should he win the Republican primary. So, Toomey was far more conservative than his predecessors in a state where critical suburban constituencies were becoming less conservative, and certainly less Republican, by the year. His accomplishments, political and substantive, have never really been appreciated by Republicans, in Penn­syl­vania or nationally. The replacement of Toomey by Oz would be of a piece with what has been happening for years in the GOP nationwide: the steady displacement of Reagan-style conservatism by Trump-style rightism, a witches’ brew of celebrity-driven politics, crackpot theories, and resent­ment.

 

He is not the only Fox News orbiter in the Pennsylvania race on the Republican side — Fox News contributor Kathy Barnette, a black, home-schooling Army veteran, also is in the mix — but Dr. Oz very well may be the hydroxychloroquine salesman Keystone State Repub­licans have been waiting for.

 

He is very likely going to find some purchase in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which is, politically speaking, one of the strangest states in the country. It is a state in which Republican politics has long been shaped by a deep current of corruption (Bob Asher, Pennsylvania’s man at the RNC for 22 years, has a raft of felony corruption charges on his curriculum vitae — perjury, racketeering, conspiracy, bribery — and spent time in federal prison; his co-conspirator, state treasurer Budd Dwyer, famously shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum revolver on live television), along with the usual heaping helping of nepotism and incompetence. In the early 2000s, solidly Republican suburbs such as Lower Merion turned as blue as Minneapolis while GOP leaders — prominent among them Senator Specter’s daughter-in-law — stood by, helpless.

 

Today, Republican Pennsylvania doesn’t really start until Lancaster County. But Donald Trump connected with something in Pennsylvania in 2016, and was the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state’s Electoral College votes since George Bush in 1988.

 

Dr. Oz, no stranger to Fox News and the Weltanschauung that goes along with it, seems at the moment inclined to run very much the same kind of campaign. What does he believe? Nothing very specific, at least so far as he is willing to say at this time. He offers a great deal of resentment against “elites” and that sort of thing, but, beyond that, it’s happy talk about “empowerment” so vacuous that his old pal Oprah Winfrey won’t even put in a good word for him. What to do about Iran and China, about the taxation of carried interest or our allies’ complaints about U.S. export-control rules? So far, Dr. Oz has not said much of any real substance about any question of complexity and interest, and he may not. Why should he? The only thing on his WinRed campaign website at the moment is the usual plaintive appeal for money, though it is a well-designed appeal with a big fat Apple Pay button right there to encourage the impulse donor. The appeal invites Oz voters to “take back the power and feel like you are in control of YOUR life again,” the familiar meaningless populist gurgle.

 

He has already picked up the im­portant Republican habits of the day, thundering “I won’t be canceled!” after the Philadelphia Inquirer, in accordance with its standard practice, declined to refer to him as “Dr.” on first reference, which he took to be a slight. (There is some irony in this: The Inquirer omits the “Dr.” for both physicians and Ph.D.s in order “to avoid complaints of unequal treatment from individuals who worked hard to achieve doctorates in nonmedical fields,” according to its stylebook.) Such weaponized sanctimony and ritual denunciations of the “people in charge” are crutches that he is going to have to lean on as every phony diet pill, hokey New Age nostrum, and quacktastical miracle cure he has ever hawked comes up in the news and gets used against him. The first New York Times skim of this material already has been brutal, reminding readers that Oz was once hauled before the Senate to be chided for his baseless pseudo-medical claims.

 

Other than having attended the University of Pennsylvania, Oz’s only connection to Pennsylvania is through his in-laws, whose address the longtime New Jersey resident assumed when he decided to run in the state. His wife is a straight-up kook, a “reiki master,” among other things, and his mother-in-law is a minister in the Pennsylvania-based Swedenborgian Church of North America, part of a constellation of cultish congregations founded by the followers of a man who claimed to have traveled to the planet Mercury and to have encountered Aristotle there. Oz himself comes from a mostly secular Muslim background but has in interviews proclaimed his adherence to the Swedenborgian ap­proach. It may be bananas, but it probably won’t hurt him much in the Philadelphia suburbs, which is the only place in the country where you meet a lot of Swedenborgians.

 

The Republican primary may end up being a circus — or it may end up being a sideshow. The leading fundraiser in the Pennsylvania Senate race, by far, is a Democrat, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, the towering (six-foot-eight) blue-collar (literally, more often found in a work shirt than a suit) progressive who cuts a colorful figure with his Hells Angels personal style and his throwback working-class politics. An Oz-vs.-Fetterman race would, in effect, pit one expression of Trumpism against the other — the Rust Belt union-hall populist against the anti-elitist television celebrity. The traditional conservatism that Senator Toomey stands for would be nowhere in the race.

 

Republicans make endless ritual denunciations of “the media,” but it should by now be apparent that their party is much more dominated by media than is the Democratic Party — only it is dominated by a particular, narrow slice of media, mostly Fox and other right-wing cable news, talk radio, and a couple of big social-media operations. The irony is that it is easier for the partisan Republican media to dominate the GOP than it is for the so-called mainstream media to dominate the Democratic Party. The smaller cultural footprint of Republican-leaning media makes it easier to garner an influential voice, whereas the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and Hollywood all have to compete with one another for influence among Democrats. And the Republican Party is also simply a weaker insti­tution, not having the vast army of government workers and government unions to sustain and people it. And so the GOP is, perversely, more vulnerable to exploitation by celebrity adventurers such as Mehmet Oz than is the Dem­ocratic Party with all its Hollywood connections.

 

It will be strange and perverse to see a figure from the cream of the media elite running a campaign against the media and elites, but these are strange and perverse times, in Pennsylvania more than most places.

No comments: