Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor who’s running for Senate in Pennsylvania, is denying reports that he is in discussions to return to television and suggested opponent David McCormick is behind the rumor.
The entertainment site Radar Online reported Tuesday that inside sources said that while Oz aims to win the May 17 Republican primary and the November 8 election for retiring Senator Pat Toomey’s (R) seat, he’s working on reviving his broadcast career in case he doesn’t prevail.
The heart surgeon hosted The Dr. Oz Show in association with Sony Pictures Television until January 2020. His show was pulled off the air in Pennsylvania pursuant to Federal Communications Commission rules stipulating that federal candidates get equal free airtime.
“He is only 61 years old and isn’t ready to retire if he doesn’t go to Washington, D.C.,” Radar quotes a source as saying. “No one wants to admit defeat, but he isn’t a stupid man. He knows his campaign is on life support. Like any good doctor, he is already looking for alternatives to keep his career alive if he doesn’t win. Fortunately for him, his appearances on Fox News and Newsmax have impressed the bosses. There is no doubt that he is a very gifted communicator on TV. Which is why there has already been talk about him becoming a prime-time opinion host.”
In a Twitter post that evening, Oz retweeted a Breitbart article on the rumor and called the idea “fake news being pushed by Dishonest Dave and his team,” a reference to McCormick, a former undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs under George W. Bush and a former chief executive officer of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.
Replying to his own post, Oz adverted to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who is backing the ex-CEO, and mentioned a false assertion the senator’s campaign staff made in 2016 that then-presidential-election opponent Ben Carson was planning on dropping out of the race.
“McCormick’s team has tried this BS before,” Oz wrote. “President Trump called it out then, I’m doing it now.”
The reply post linked to a video clip from a winter 2016 GOP presidential primary debate during which Donald Trump castigated the Texan for having his staff say the retired neurosurgeon was ending his presidential bid.
Cruz apologized to Carson for his campaign spreading the falsehood, characterizing it as a “mistake” based on a CNN report, although CNN had not suggested that Carson was signaling he would exit the campaign for the White House.
Oz announced his Senate bid in late November, soon after erstwhile frontrunner Sean Parnell suspended his campaign amid family and legal troubles. Parnell, an Army veteran from Pittsburgh, would eventually endorse McCormick, who also hails from the Pittsburgh area.
Oz, who had raised $5,874,436 and spent $4,845,197 as of the last campaign-finance-reporting period ending December 31, was well ahead of other Republican candidates in two early polls conducted by the GOP-aligned Trafalgar Group. But McCormick, who announced his candidacy in mid-January, has pulled ahead in later polls conducted throughout February and early March. A FOX news survey of 960 likely voters had McCormick ahead by nine percentage points as of March 6.
Because of the former executive’s relatively late entry into the Senate contest, he has not needed to disclose his fundraising sources or totals and will not need to do so until mid-April, roughly a month before Pennsylvania’s primary. A super PAC (political action committee) backing McCormick, known as Honor PAC, has spent nearly $8 million on television advertisements largely blasting Oz for taking liberal positions on issues like abortion and Obamacare in the past.
Oz and his backers have aired ads against McCormick, especially criticizing favorable comments the latter made about communist China years ago during his service in the Bush administration. (The former undersecretary has since taken a more hawkish stance against China.)
Other Republican Senate hopefuls include real-estate developer Jeff Bartos, political commentator Kathy Barnette of Montgomery County, attorney George Bochetto of Philadelphia, former Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands of Cumberland County and businessman Everett Stern of Philadelphia. The GOP nominee will likely face either Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D), a former mayor of Braddock, or U.S. Representative Conor Lamb (D-PA-17).
Neither Oz’s campaign nor McCormick’s returned a request for comment.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Dr. Mehmet Oz” by Dr. Mehmet Oz.
