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.
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