Finally, a Dr. Oz Show That I Really Want to Watch
July 28, 2022
Credit...Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/opinion/dr...enate.html
I must have watched a few whole episodes of “The Dr. Oz Show” when I wrote a long profile of Mehmet Oz for The Times Magazine back in 2010, but afterward? Please. I’m a glutton, but not for punishment, and the snippets of the show that I’d happen upon convinced me that snippets sufficed.
Oz was more huckster than healer, more showman than shaman, grinning dopily as he sacrificed his integrity on the altar of ratings. I encountered enough Faustian parables of that ilk as a journalist covering politics. I didn’t need them in my daytime television.
But I’m enthralled by Oz’s newest production, by which I mean his campaign for the Senate. It may be my favorite Senate race ever.
By “favorite” I don’t mean that it inspires me, at least not to anything but disputably clever prose. I mean that it has such a surfeit of unlikely details, such a concentration of modern political themes.
Such enormous stakes, too. While Republicans are very likely to win back the House in November 2022, thanks to the normal midterm pendulum swing and voters’ profound economic anxiety, Democrats have a real chance to hold on to the Senate, and their fate probably rests on a few key contests, including the one in Pennsylvania between Oz, the Republican nominee, and John Fetterman, his Democratic rival. They’re vying for the seat being vacated by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who’s retiring.
You couldn’t script a matchup like this. Oz, an accomplished surgeon, has spent decades enshrining himself as a trim, taut, manically energetic paradigm of peak health; I sometimes look at him and just see a big bowl of leafy greens and ancient grains dressed with low-fat yogurt. I look at Fetterman and see a sausage pizza. (I think I mean that as a compliment.)
Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke just days before the Democratic primary in May and spent the next two months off the campaign trail, in recovery.
He said recently that his hearing still isn’t what it used to be. He also disclosed that he’d been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in 2017 but hadn’t faithfully taken his prescribed medication or even returned to the doctor over the next five years.
So it’s the health truant versus the health tyrant.
But it’s also the television wizard versus the Twitter wiseacre. Oz knows how to woo and wow a small-screen audience, but, as the subhead of an excellent recent article by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian noted, Fetterman “is wielding social media might against star power.”
The Fetterman campaign operates in extreme meme mode, trolling Oz in particular for being a New Jerseyan in unpersuasive Pennsylvania drag. It deconstructed the décor in an Oz campaign video to show that he was speaking from a room in his New Jersey manse. It hired the “Jersey Shore” star Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi to beckon Oz home in a video clip that got more than three million views on Twitter.
It followed that inspired mischief with a video in which another recognizable ambassador for New Jersey — the guitarist Steven Van Zandt, who plays in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and had a role in “The Sopranos” — cautions Oz about his Pennsylvania misadventure.
But the most devastating recent Oz taunt came from outside the Fetterman campaign, in the form of an ad that documented the doctor’s recurring promotion of bogus miracle cures and used footage from “The Wizard of Oz” to shame him for it.
Dorothy, Toto and the gang never performed a nobler service.
Oz is off. He responded to the sneak Snooki attack with a cringe-inducing game of famous-acquaintance one-upmanship. “She’s been on my show,” he told Dom Giordano, a Philadelphia talk-radio host. “I know all these celebrities. I could actually have celebrities do my campaign for me.”
Take that, John Fetterman! You may have a consistent political ideology. Oz has been to the Emmys.
Therein lies a Republican predicament. With Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and, to a lesser extent, J.D. Vance in Ohio, the party has nominated Senate candidates whose star statuses aren’t paired with comparable political acumen and whose flaws or fumbles have given their Democratic counterparts a better chance than they might have had against more experienced, more traditional candidates.
Fame is funny that way.
It can be redeemed for many things but not for everything. And the blessing of Donald Trump — which Oz, Vance and Walker all received — is funny, too. It giveth in the primary only to taketh away in the general, or at least (fingers crossed) that’s a distinct possibility.
Despite Fetterman’s stroke and convalescence, he has been raising much more money than Oz has. He was more than five points ahead of Oz in two June polls. The National Review columnist Jim Geraghty called Oz “the wildly underperforming Ford Pinto of Republican Senate candidates.”
Not even a Tesla in vain search of a charging station? Whatever the beleaguered vehicle’s make and model, I can’t take my eyes off this car wreck.
July 28, 2022
Credit...Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/opinion/dr...enate.html
I must have watched a few whole episodes of “The Dr. Oz Show” when I wrote a long profile of Mehmet Oz for The Times Magazine back in 2010, but afterward? Please. I’m a glutton, but not for punishment, and the snippets of the show that I’d happen upon convinced me that snippets sufficed.
Oz was more huckster than healer, more showman than shaman, grinning dopily as he sacrificed his integrity on the altar of ratings. I encountered enough Faustian parables of that ilk as a journalist covering politics. I didn’t need them in my daytime television.
But I’m enthralled by Oz’s newest production, by which I mean his campaign for the Senate. It may be my favorite Senate race ever.
By “favorite” I don’t mean that it inspires me, at least not to anything but disputably clever prose. I mean that it has such a surfeit of unlikely details, such a concentration of modern political themes.
Such enormous stakes, too. While Republicans are very likely to win back the House in November 2022, thanks to the normal midterm pendulum swing and voters’ profound economic anxiety, Democrats have a real chance to hold on to the Senate, and their fate probably rests on a few key contests, including the one in Pennsylvania between Oz, the Republican nominee, and John Fetterman, his Democratic rival. They’re vying for the seat being vacated by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who’s retiring.
You couldn’t script a matchup like this. Oz, an accomplished surgeon, has spent decades enshrining himself as a trim, taut, manically energetic paradigm of peak health; I sometimes look at him and just see a big bowl of leafy greens and ancient grains dressed with low-fat yogurt. I look at Fetterman and see a sausage pizza. (I think I mean that as a compliment.)
Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke just days before the Democratic primary in May and spent the next two months off the campaign trail, in recovery.
He said recently that his hearing still isn’t what it used to be. He also disclosed that he’d been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in 2017 but hadn’t faithfully taken his prescribed medication or even returned to the doctor over the next five years.
So it’s the health truant versus the health tyrant.
But it’s also the television wizard versus the Twitter wiseacre. Oz knows how to woo and wow a small-screen audience, but, as the subhead of an excellent recent article by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian noted, Fetterman “is wielding social media might against star power.”
The Fetterman campaign operates in extreme meme mode, trolling Oz in particular for being a New Jerseyan in unpersuasive Pennsylvania drag. It deconstructed the décor in an Oz campaign video to show that he was speaking from a room in his New Jersey manse. It hired the “Jersey Shore” star Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi to beckon Oz home in a video clip that got more than three million views on Twitter.
It followed that inspired mischief with a video in which another recognizable ambassador for New Jersey — the guitarist Steven Van Zandt, who plays in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and had a role in “The Sopranos” — cautions Oz about his Pennsylvania misadventure.
But the most devastating recent Oz taunt came from outside the Fetterman campaign, in the form of an ad that documented the doctor’s recurring promotion of bogus miracle cures and used footage from “The Wizard of Oz” to shame him for it.
Dorothy, Toto and the gang never performed a nobler service.
Oz is off. He responded to the sneak Snooki attack with a cringe-inducing game of famous-acquaintance one-upmanship. “She’s been on my show,” he told Dom Giordano, a Philadelphia talk-radio host. “I know all these celebrities. I could actually have celebrities do my campaign for me.”
Take that, John Fetterman! You may have a consistent political ideology. Oz has been to the Emmys.
Therein lies a Republican predicament. With Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and, to a lesser extent, J.D. Vance in Ohio, the party has nominated Senate candidates whose star statuses aren’t paired with comparable political acumen and whose flaws or fumbles have given their Democratic counterparts a better chance than they might have had against more experienced, more traditional candidates.
Fame is funny that way.
It can be redeemed for many things but not for everything. And the blessing of Donald Trump — which Oz, Vance and Walker all received — is funny, too. It giveth in the primary only to taketh away in the general, or at least (fingers crossed) that’s a distinct possibility.
Despite Fetterman’s stroke and convalescence, he has been raising much more money than Oz has. He was more than five points ahead of Oz in two June polls. The National Review columnist Jim Geraghty called Oz “the wildly underperforming Ford Pinto of Republican Senate candidates.”
Not even a Tesla in vain search of a charging station? Whatever the beleaguered vehicle’s make and model, I can’t take my eyes off this car wreck.
