Dr. Mehmet Oz was defeated in his Pennsylvania U.S. senate race against John Fetterman on Tuesday. This decision by the people of Pennsylvania saved them from electing one of the worst candidates in recent history.
Oz is everything wrong with American politics. Politicians can often be inauthentic, but Oz has raised the bar for fraudulence with his campaign.
To start, Oz isn’t even from Pennsylvania. He only went to university there and was raised in Wilmington, Delaware. He moved to Pennsylvania in 2020 with the 2022 Senate race in sight.
Politicians’ inauthenticity often takes the form of lying to people about what they’ll do if elected. For doing this, they are maligned as hucksters. In Oz’s case, this is a legitimate description of him given that his career before politics revolved around him selling products by exaggerating or lying about their effects.
The disgrace of the medical practice that he calls a TV career began with a segment on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before he started “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2009.
Throughout his two-decade-long run on television, the snake oil salesman promoted ineffective and sometimes harmful products from companies—ones he was often invested in. Oz’s career before his political candidacy was essentially corruption training, so it’s not hard to imagine he could easily be paid off in office.
Oz went on “The Dom Giordano Program,” a Philadelphia radio show, and talked about Big Pharma, saying, “I’ve taken these guys on. I have the scars to prove it.” This would be true if he meant that he’s taken them on as business partners and if by “scars” he meant “money.”
Oz has been paid to speak on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, hoping to leverage his reputation for profit. Voters were right to question the authenticity of a man claiming that he would do a heel turn while in office and bite the hand that feeds him.
The slimy grifter has often attempted—and failed—to relate to Pennsylvanians.
In a speech at a rally with former President Donald Trump, he confidently told voters, “Tomorrow morning when you awaken, I want you to contact 10 people, do it before church, do it before the [Pittsburgh] Steelers game.”
He was referring to a nonexistent football game. The Steelers were on a bye week, meaning they wouldn’t play again until the following week.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a small meaningless slip-up, but it’s comically poetic. He chose to pander along the lines of football because it’s the quintessential American sport and the Steelers have one of the most passionate fan bases of any team in the NFL. Shouting out the home team is an easy way to score points—that is, unless you pick the only week in the entire fall when the team doesn’t play to reference their game.
Oz had a wide-open layup, but he slipped, fell and threw the ball 94 feet back into the other team’s basket.
Oz exemplifies the biggest problems in American politics. He’s a phony who uses his deceitful nature to obscure the puppet strings behind him, and he should be kept as far away as possible from any public office.
Frank Kidd is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from Springfield, Virginia.
