The tit-for-tat between Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman and his GOP opponent Dr Mehmet Oz continues to ratchet up as the Pennsylvania politicians inch closer to the midterm election.
Mr Fetterman took to Twitter on Wednesday to release a quick-turnaround campaign video that addressed the pair’s most recent flare up, calling out his Trump-backed opponent’s attacks against his health.
“How many of you, maybe yourself, have had a big health challenge?” Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor began in his recently released campaign video for Senate.
Mr Fetterman, who suffered a major health setback last spring when he announced that he’d had a stroke and would be stepping away from in-person campaigning and would only return when he felt it was safe to do so, is seen raising his hand when he asks the question to a room full of supporters.
He then goes on to ask if anyone in the room has had a parent, relative or even a child suffer from a similar major health event, questions that evoked even more nods and even small affirmative murmurs.
“Can you even imagine if you had a doctor that was mocking your illness or ridiculing that?” he asks, before exasperatedly saying “well, here we are.”
Mr Fetterman was referring to a statement released by the campaign for his Trump-backed opponent, which in an attempt to goad Fetterman’s campaign to setting a date for the pair’s first public debate, included a list of “concessions”, which included an offer to have “medical personnel” on standby.
“We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby,” the Oz campaign wrote, seeming to prod at Mr Fetterman’s recent stroke episode.
After declining the invitation to the debate, Mr Fetterman made his first swipe at his opponent’s campaign, saying it has made it “abundantly clear that they think it is funny to mock a stroke survivor.”
In the follow-up video, Mr Fetterman went step further and noted that, while he he’d like to think that Dr Oz has maybe “lost his way”, he doesn’t fully believe that he “ever had his way”.
“This is a guy who made a career of selling ‘miracle diet pills’,” the Democratic candidate said, referencing the celebrity physician’s previous career where he peddled “magic” weight loss pills, a stint that earned him a spot in front of a bipartisan Senate committee over his hyped-up claims.
While appearing before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection in 2014, a Democratic senator quoted the TV host back to himself, saying: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type — it’s green coffee extract.”
For his part, Dr Oz has seemed to try and distance the remarks made by his campaign in recent days from his own.
While appearing on KDKA on Tuesday, Dr Oz told Pittsburgh radio host Larry Richert that “the campaign has been saying lots of things”.
“My position – and I can only speak to what I’m saying – is that John Fetterman should be allowed to recover fully and I will support his ability, as someone who’s gone through a difficult time, to get ready.”
In that interview, Dr Oz was responding to a separate incident where the campaign had, once again, gone after their opponent’s health.
On 23 August, Insider reported that Dr Oz’s communications adviser, Rachel Tripp, had been quoted as saying that if the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.”
Dr Oz’s campaign, however, seems to be digging their own heels in the sand, releasing another statement on Wednesday about Mr Fetterman declining to debate his opponent that appeared, once again, to make light of the Democratic candidate’s health.
In a list of the the “Top 10 Reasons John Fetterman Pulled Out of KDKA-TV Debate”, the campaign ranks number five as being because he “might accidentally reveal a health condition that’s worse than previously disclosed!”
The ongoing attacks, regardless of the source, don’t seem to be helping the Republican candidate’s campaign, as recent polling shows the Democratic incumbent outpacing Dr Oz, including recent surveys from Emerson College and Franklin and Marshall College.
Outside of the polls, Mr Fetterman’s fundraising efforts have similarly benefited from Dr Oz’s political gaffes. In a recent stint where the TV doctor attempted to slight Joe Biden’s economic recovery by showing a video of himself grocery shopping for crudite, he garbles the name of the supermarket and misstates the prices of the items he clumsily stacks into his arms.
This widely panned video, according to Mr Fetterman’s campaign manager Brendan McPhillips, raked in the team half a million dollars in just 24 hours with $65,000 coming in from a campaign sticker that read: “Wegners: Let them eat Crudité.”
