Hey everyone! been taking a break for a bit because of work and family stuff plus the holidays are coming up but I promise you I am going to be back at full steam soon. Right now, I’m back in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. I’ll be here and Philly and New York and hopefully D.C. and Baltimore from now until mid-January, working remotely. Since I’ve been home, I’m already seeing commercials for Dr. Oz Mehmet’s (R. NJ) U.S. Senate campaign. Apparently, Dr. Oz is so determined to win the GOP nominee that he told CNN’s Michael Smerconish that he shouldn’t expect to see him on their “fake news” network out of fear of angering the MAGA base:
Smerconish told listeners on his Sirius XM radio show that he ran into Oz at a Christmas party and asked him to appear on either the radio show or the CNN show he’s been hosting since Chris Cuomo was fired earlier this month.
“I don’t think he had any idea who I was,” Smerconish admitted, but he said he hoped Oz, who is running as a Republican in Pennsylvania, would come on either show to make a case for his candidacy to more moderate voters.
“I said to him, ‘I’d really like to get you on my program, and I will treat you with dignity and respect,’” Smerconish said, according to Mediaite.
However, Oz declined.
“He proceeds to say to me, ‘I can’t possible do that because it would upset everybody at Fox. And I’ll come on your show after the primary.’”
Smerconish said he might be “violating a Christmas party confidence” by discussing the meeting with his listeners but said he also told Oz, “Dr. Oz, you can’t pull this off without reaching independents and centrists.’”
Oz wasn’t swayed.
“He said to me, ‘The mission right now is to win the primary,’” Smerconish said, adding, “This was surreal.”
The fact that he’s doing that proves he’s serious about winning the primary. In the mean time, his show is suspended:
As expected, the long-running “Dr. Oz Show” will end in the wake of host Dr. Mehmet Oz’s announcement late last month that he’s running for U.S. Senate.
The daily hourlong talk show, syndicated across the country by Sony Pictures Television, will end Jan. 14 after 13 seasons, Sony said in a statement Monday.
As The Times previously reported, the program will be replaced by “The Good Dish,” a one-hour syndicated show co-hosted by Oz’s daughter Daphne Oz, “Top Chef” judge Gail Simmons and Food Network star Jamika Pessoa. It will debut Jan. 17 in the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas markets.
“The Dr. Oz Show” was promptly pulled from several of those markets — specifically those that reach Pennsylvania TV households — after the celebrity heart surgeon announced his intention to run for the state’s open Senate seat as a Republican, in hopes of replacing retiring Sen. Pat Toomey.
By the way, he barely gave his staff enough heads up:
Celebrity doctor Mehmet “Dr. Oz” Oz is running for Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania, he announced in a 2 p.m. post on the website of the conservative Washington Examiner. According to a source close to the syndicated Dr. Oz Show, which has aired since 2009, Oz sent the program’s staff a one-paragraph email about 15 minutes before the hour informing them that he would be leaving the show to do so. “I can no longer witness the suffering and anger of our countrymen from the safety of our studio,” he wrote.
“My decision has created important challenges for each of you,” Oz’s email continues, seemingly referring to the important challenges of sustaining a paycheck derived from something called The Dr. Oz Show after it no longer involves Dr. Oz, “but I feel a patriotic duty to embark on this journey.” The email says producers “have a strong plan to move the show forward without me,” though the source close to the show says that staffers have not received official word about what that plan is.
Curiously, as the AP notes, Dr. Oz is a known resident of Cliffside Park, New Jersey, which in addition to not being in Pennsylvania, is also not near Pennsylvania. It is, rather, adjacent to New York City, where Oz’s show is filmed. He did register to vote this year at “his in-laws’ address in suburban Philadelphia,” the wire service notes, and met his wife at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
Back to the CNN thing, another reason Oz has to do this is to hide the fact that not only is he not from Pennsylvania, he’s actually an endangered pro-choice Republican:
When the Supreme Court heard arguments last week for a case that could upend abortion rights nationwide, Mehmet Oz—the TV doctor and accused “quack” turned Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania—suggested he was at peace that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade.
But only two years earlier, Oz characterized efforts to overturn Roe as a misleading and possibly conspiratorial crusade. Not only was Oz supportive of abortion rights, he seemed puzzled that people would spend time fighting abortion rights—going so far as to say that, as a physician, he was “really worried” about the anti-abortion movement and that eliminating Roe would have negative effects on women’s health.
“It’s, as a doctor—just putting my doctor hat on—it’s a big-time concern,” Oz said in the 2019 interview, which aired on the Breakfast Club radio show. “Because I went to medical school in Philadelphia, and I saw women who had coat-hanger events. And I mean really traumatic events that happened when they were younger, before Roe v. Wade. And many of them were harmed for life.”
Oz conceded that abortion “is a hard issue for everybody,” and he said that, on “a personal level,” he disliked abortion and would not want anyone in his family to have one. But he took a common pro-choice position in 2019 that his belief should not be forced onto others. He would not want to “interfere with everyone else’s stuff,” he said, “because it’s hard enough to get into life as it is.”
Oz’s defense of abortion wasn’t just a passing question. He held forth for seven minutes in this 2019 interview about the practice and was highly critical of anti-abortion advocates who argue that life begins at conception. His tone throughout the entire segment on abortion was one of concern that legislators might be passing abortion restrictions, and he seemed to endorse viability—generally thought of as about 24 weeks—as a popular limit for abortion.
So he’s trying to play the distraction game by attacking the press:
During a Monday interview with Steve Doocy on "Fox and Friends," Dr. Oz claimed that the Philadelphia Inquirer daily newspaper is trying to silence him by referring to him by his name, Mehmet Oz, in its coverage of the 2022 US Senate election in Pennsylvania.
Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, university professor, and author, announced on November 30 that he is running as a Republican candidate for the Senate seat, which is being vacated by long-serving Sen. Pat Toomey. He joins the race alongside 27 other candidates: 12 Republicans, 14 Democrats, and a Libertarian.
"Why would [the Inquirer] not want to call me Dr. Oz? Everyone knows I'm Dr. Oz, but they don't think it's the right thing to do. They think it gives me an unfair advantage," Oz said.
While Oz lambasted the local newspaper for dropping his doctor title, the practice is standard in newsrooms that follow the Associated Press Stylebook, an American English grammar style and usage guide created by journalists working for or connected with the Associated Press.
By the way, Oz is clearly that one out of ten Doctors who goes against medical science, especially when it comes to COVID-19. Dr. Daniel Summers’ makes the case in his Daily Beast op-ed:
It’s been obvious for years that Oz is more than happy to leverage his reputation as a cardiothoracic surgeon and medical scientist in service to his own celebrity and advancement, and isn’t one to let quaint little things like facts stand in his way. Stroll down a checkout aisle in your local grocery store, and chances are strong you’ll see his smiling face on the cover of a magazine touting some wildly unhealthy weight-loss claim. He’s been promoting pseudoscience on his show for years, from obesity “remedies” like green coffee and garcinia cambogia to hawking “homeopathy starter kits,” so this is nothing new.
What’s been even more troubling during the pandemic is his willingness to speak in favor of treatments like hydroxychloroquine that have no merit for the care of COVID patients, going as far as touting the drug on Fox & Friends. As I’ve previously written, he even appeared on Fox and “suggested that the mere 2-3 percent increase in COVID-19 mortality that would come from reopening schools nationwide might be a worthwhile trade-off.” Medical misinformation is literally killing people, and it is unconscionable that anyone who should know better would contribute to it. And Oz most certainly should and does know better.
It is telling that Oz would see a space for himself in the Republican primary field. The GOP is riddled with prominent figures who undermine the seriousness of the pandemic, refute the importance of getting vaccinated, and denigrate the public health officials tasked with keeping the American people as safe and healthy as possible. Voters for those people are the ones Oz sees himself capable of wooing. That is the base he will need to capture to make his candidacy a success.
That he apparently likes his chances is enormously troubling.
While I have written more in favor of Western Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidates like Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D. PA) and Rep. Conor Lamb’s (D. PA-17) campaigns, the Democrats also have a highly qualified and praised Doctor in the primary. Here’s a great New York Times profile piece on Chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, Dr. Val Arkoosh (D. PA):
Dr. Arkoosh, a physician in obstetric anesthesiology and a top elected official in Montgomery County in the Philadelphia suburbs, is trying to pitch herself as a kind of anti-Dr. Oz.
“It really does take a doctor to stand up to a doctor,” Dr. Arkoosh told me. “I don’t even know how he still has a license, with some of the stuff that comes out his mouth,” she said of his promotion of unproved Covid-19 treatments early in the pandemic.
Dr. Oz, a celebrity doctor who, until recently, hosted “The Dr. Oz Show,”is well positioned, thanks to personal wealth and high name recognition, to become a front-runner in a G.O.P. field where no one has yet nailed down voters’ allegiance. The contest to fill Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat will be one of the hardest fought in the country in 2022, with majority control of the Senate at stake.
Dr. Oz, who jumped into the race last week, is framing his candidacy as a conservative’s response to the pandemic, pushing back against mandates, shutdowns and limits to “freedom.”
Dr. Arkoosh, on the other hand, helped lead an aggressive response to the pandemic as the leader of the Montgomery County board of commissioners. In an interview, she contrasted her efforts to ensure the safety of students in her county to Dr. Oz’s position on schools at the time: During the same month that she canceled graduation ceremonies last year, Dr. Oz urged on Fox News that schools should be open because it “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality” of the population.
In response to Dr. Arkoosh’s criticism, a spokeswoman for Dr. Oz’s campaign, Erin Perrine, pointed to his success as a heart surgeon and to his TV show and books, which she said “empowered millions to make better health care choices — even if it meant going against the medical establishment.”
Dr. Arkoosh, 61, has struggled for attention from Democratic voters and donors in the shadow of the leaders of her primary: Mr. Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, and Mr. Lamb, a congressman. The two men are usually contrasted against one another as a progressive (Mr. Fetterman, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016) versus a moderate (Mr. Lamb, who won a congressional district that voted for President Donald J. Trump).
Dr. Arkoosh is liberal on issues — she wants to ban fracking and to add a public option to the health care marketplace — but what sets her apart may be demographics.
Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb are both from Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania. They each argue that they are best suited to make inroads with white blue-collar voters. Meanwhile, Dr. Arkoosh’s base, Montgomery County — the state’s third most populous and the second richest — is ground zero for the suburban shift to Democrats in recent years. In all, Philadelphia and its suburbs in southeast Pennsylvania contribute 50 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters.
“In Montgomery County in 2020, we gave President Biden 66,000 more votes than we gave Hillary Clinton,” Dr. Arkoosh said. “It is where my base is, where my strength is.”
And like the rest of the Democratic candidates, Arkoosh is also supportive in abolishing the filibuster:
Health and Democracy are on the ballot next year and we have to take Dr. Oz’s candidacy seriously and get ready to keep Pennsylvania Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with these Pennsylvania Democrats campaigns:
Governor
U.S. Senate
Pennsylvania Courts
Lori Dumas for Commonwealth Court
Lt. Governor
Pennsylvania Organizations
Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee
Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Campaign Committee
Congress: