Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign makes a stop in Hershey, and it’s like daytime TV at night

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the surgeon-turned-daytime television star who is now running for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, brought his campaign to Hershey Wednesday, and it’s a bit of a trip into America’s culture wars.

For about an hour at the Antique Auto Club of America’s museum outside Hershey, Oz didn’t offer policy prescriptions as much as a call for conservative to get loud and proud about their values. As a combined force, Oz told his crowd, they can get their country back.

That may sound like another television-personality who jumped into electoral politics, it’s by design.

Oz is running hard for the Republican nomination for Senate from Pennsylvania as a candidate who is most true to the policies and values championed by former President Donald Trump. At one point in Wednesday’s presentation, Oz declared Trump one of the greatest presidents in modern American history, along with Ronald Reagan.

But in this case, it’s hardly Trump 2.0.

On Oz’s campaign set, there are no middle-school putdowns of political rivals, or bullying of opponents.

In true TV host form, Oz was more likely to pull up a chair next to a COVID survivor, or wrap his arms around the young girl with Down Syndrome who asked him if he would support legislation that guaranteed people with disabilities equal access to organ transplants and other levels of critical care. The doctor, naturally, was on board.

It’s not exactly an enemy-free approach.

Wednesday’s event was broken into segments, with each pause devoted to a new version of counter-punch ads aimed specifically at former hedge fund executive David McCormick, with whom Oz and his Super-PAC allies have been trading blows with on television throughout the NFL playoffs, the Winter Olympic games and whatever else viewers have been watching.

McCormick was the only primary opponent mentioned in Oz’s ad breaks.

But the doctor’s relentlessly upbeat spirit during the rest of Wednesday’s event seemed instead to be an appeal to followers to band together with an almost-evangelistic zeal, on the bet that through strength in numbers and with open hands rather than clenched fists their arguments will win the day.

“We need to find our grounding again. We need to be able to be vocally saying what you just said so that they can’t silence us all,” Oz said in response to a retired physician who bemoaned the stifling of research on certain aspects of COVID treatment in the name of pushing the vaccines. “Because if you put your hands up one at a time, you get shot. If you all put your hands up at once, it’s a movement.”

It remains to be seen if Oz’s army will materialize in big enough numbers to win this hotly-contested primary.

Wednesday’s event ran like a carbon copy of Oz’s now-suspended daytime television show. Oz spoke in a theater-in-the-round setting at the museum, his audience surrounding him on three sides.

He shared his personal story, and then how he came to be a political candidate: The government’s top-down and heavy-handed approach to the coronavirus pandemic, he said, helped him see government through a new lens, and the view suggested that the government / media approach to many aspects of society leads to less-than-desired outcomes,

And what’s more, he said, he became alarmed at how the act of pushing back puts one squarely in the court of cancel culture.

That’s something Oz said he experienced personally in 2020, when he suggested that the drug hydroxychloroquine deserved more study as a treatment against COVID, the notion got picked up by Trump, and “Oh my goodness. He was hated, that the medication was cancelled,” Oz said. “Even today, just to be clear, we don’t know if it works.

“How is that possible? Two years later, an inexpensive pill that maybe might have worked, maybe not. We’ll never know,” Oz said, claiming that his own effort to research hydroxychloroquine at Columbia University was blocked by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In short order, the state banned the prescription of the drug for COVID.

“And that was the beginning of a long cascade of events where the federal government began to move doctors out of the way and directly care for patients…. We were told, don’t make things difficult. Just follow orders.”

Hydroxychloroquine is an approved drug, but not for treating COVID-19. Studies so far have been inconclusive about whether it helps. In the meantime, federal authorities and most doctors have warned against using it for COVID-19.

Oz said Wednesday he began to see the same patterns in education with school curricula; leaky enforcement of border security that letting narcos flood the zone with fentanyl and other drugs; energy policy that hurts America by artificially limiting gas and oil production; and massive government spending that is fueling inflation that’s hurting working-class Americans.

That’s the revolution that Oz said he wants to help lead as a member of the Senate.

He said it’s a battle against a victim mindset, where it’s always the “oppressors’ fault” whenever there’s a problem.

“So they, the federal government – the left, woke part of the Democratic Party – is going to push down the oppressor. And that oppressor can be you and me. Anybody. Whoever happens to have the upper hand gets pushed down. And notice, we’re not helping the victim come up. We’re pushing down the oppressor.”

Oz likened it to a Marxist ideology that runs the risk of replacing American individualism and enterprise.

“If we can just do that – say what we see – in itself that will start the cultural shift back toward understanding what our values are,”

Oz, 61, got his values through the traditional American Dream story. A Cleveland-born son of Turkish immigrants, he earned medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

But he has practiced medicine and filmed his television show in Manhattan for decades, and his principal residence has long been in Bergen County in northern New Jersey. He did become a registered Pennsylvania voter in 2021, however, registering at an address that is a home owned by his mother-in-law in Montgomery County and voting in elections there by absentee ballot.

That has opened him up to attacks from some rivals that he is vulnerable to attacks of carpet-bagging that could hurt him in the general election.

Oz addressed in a brief interview after his public session, noting that he is currently building his own home on a 35-acre property in Bryn Athyn.

That was just before, by the way, he did a 9:30 shot on the Sean Hannity show on Fox News.

While fantastically successful in medicine and media, Oz’s hometown northjersey.com reported upon his entry into the race last fall that Oz has been dogged by accusations that he is a charlatan selling “quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain,” as a group of doctors wrote in 2015 in a letter calling for his firing from Columbia University’s medical school. He wasn’t fired.

Oz is also able to self-fund a robust broadcast advertising campaign.

According to an analysis from AdImpact, Oz’s campaign had spent $5.5 million to run ads by Super Bowl weekend, running just a little ahead of the $4.8 million spent by fellow GOP hopeful McCormick’s campaign. According to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Oz’s personal contributions to his campaign also exceeded $5.2 million by the end of 2021.

The Pennsylvania Senate race is expected to be one of the most hotly-contested and most expensive in the nation this year, as both parties seek to claim the seat opened by the retirement of incumbent Pat Toomey in what is expected to be a fight to the finish for majority control of the U.S. Senate in the next Congress.

Toomey, a Lehigh Valley Republican, announced in late 2020 that he would not be seeking a third term.

The Pennsylvania primary is May 17.