Inside Dr. Oz's Campaign Road Show
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BUTLER, Pa. — Mehmet Oz was late for his show. The TV personality, doctor, politician — whatever you want to call him now — was running about 10 minutes behind schedule to his “meet and greet” in rural western Pennsylvania, an event that promised at least a photo with Oz and, for a lucky few, your very own blood pressure reading.
Once Oz arrived at this restaurant-laser tag arcade deep in Trump country, he spent another 10 minutes preparing for his appearance. He stayed hidden but close to the audience, behind a black curtain that featured a banner with his campaign slogan in bubbly cursive: “A Dose of Reality.”
Fifty or so people were seated quietly while Oz was backstage, where he greeted a baby and shook its foot. He posed for photos, huddled with his team, recorded something on camera and went over notes. And then he was ready.
Dressed in a crisp navy suit, Oz walked out from behind the curtain like he was about to tape an episode of “The Dr. Oz Show,” the daytime health and wellness TV program he hosted for more than a decade before ending it to run for office.
This is still the Dr. Oz show, of course, but not the one most people are used to seeing. For anyone who doesn’t know Oz as the Republican who wants to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate (and that’s pretty much the general public at this point), the change can be jarring at first — then comfortable, like a rerun of a syndicated show you’ve seen a million times.
“How many of you think Washington got it wrong?” Oz said immediately upon taking the mic. “Did they get it wrong on gas prices? Are we suffering from inflation? People not working and getting paid not to? Did Washington get it wrong on the border? Did Washington mess up our schools, teaching kids values we don’t agree with? Well, here’s the truth. I’m an outsider, and I’ve taken on Washington, Fauci, the media — for you. Are you ready for a dose of reality?”
In his two decades as a celebrity, Oz has made numerous pitches to the American public. He’s hawked health advice, alternative medicine, supplements, books, “miracle” cures, weight loss fixes — a promise of a more vital, more youthful YOU (the theme of Oz’s literary collection). This, today, was Oz’s pitch for office.
And he wants to know what’s got your blood pressure rising — which, he emphasizes, rather seriously, can lead to heart attack or stroke.
“You shouldn’t have a high blood pressure. It’s the No. 1 cause of aging. Period. We’ll talk about that in a second,” Oz said, teasing the blood pressure device draped on the stool next to him like he was about to break for a commercial. Then he returned to the real task at hand: “What gets your blood pressure up oftentimes is the things we all worry about because we’re all patriotic Americans.”
This is both new and old hat for Oz. The 61-year-old celebrity heart surgeon has never run for office, let alone talked much in public about his politics. But the open seat in a swing state President Joe Biden won by a hair has both sides seeing what might possibly stick, and a showman who has already been in America’s living room isn’t the most unthinkable option.
In the contest for the GOP nomination, Oz has several rivals: Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator; Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor; Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO; and Carla Sands, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Denmark. Oz and McCormick are spending millions trading attacks on TV, giving the two men an early boost in the polls, even though they’re both newcomers who have spent the past several decades living in other states.
This vulnerability is why Oz dedicates time to describing each and every tie he has to a state he hasn’t appeared to have lived in full-time since the 1980s.
Oz was born in Cleveland but grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, earned dual medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and married Lisa Lemole (now Oz), whose family is well established in Bryn Athyn, a town founded as a religious community in 1916. Oz is claiming his in-laws’ place as his residence while he campaigns.
“We’re living in the house we got married in. The best thing I ever did in my life was to marry her 36 years ago,” Oz said, motioning for Lisa Oz, who was watching from near the curtain and dressed casually in jeans and sneakers, to come to the front of the room next to him.
Early in their careers, the Ozes relocated to the New York City area (they’ve since acquired a mansion overlooking the Hudson River in New Jersey) so Mehmet Oz could pursue medicine and Lisa Oz could act in commercials. “I began to learn how big the world is out there, and how often they don’t listen to all of us regular folks,” he said, without the slightest hint of irony. “And I felt like an outsider there, too.”
Like Trump, Oz is using the term “outsider” to frame his candidacy to voters. He’s the guy who’s got your back, who’s been fighting “Big Tech” and “Big Pharma” throughout his career — even when there’s little evidence he has done that and more evidence he hasn’t.
Oz already has a well-placed foil: fellow doctor Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert. Using an example from his wheelhouse about Washington “getting it wrong,” Oz argued that Fauci and the government overstepped their pandemic response by attempting to restrict too many freedoms.
“What happened during COVID was the government thinking they could do something that they couldn’t do,” Oz said. “They couldn’t micromanage all of our health. What if the government said, ‘I want everybody taking blood pressure pills.’ How does that work? Not very smart. We wouldn’t even accept that as a possibility. We literally did that with COVID!”
He was responding then to a question from a woman in the audience who said she took ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug, to treat COVID, something federal regulators and the medical community at large doesn’t recommend. She described herself as a “liberal Democrat” until the pandemic, and said she plans to change her registration to Republican before the election — Democrats’ actual nightmare scenario heading into the midterms.
“I have never been so disappointed in Democrats,” she said, and went on to ask if Oz would reform the FDA and CDC and have Fauci “prosecuted.” For what she didn’t say.
Oz used that opening to segue to his thoughts on hydroxychloroquine, which he argues should have been studied more for its use treating COVID.
“Today, as a doctor — and I’m living this right now — I cannot get my patients pills or antibody cocktails to treat them as outpatients if they get COVID,” Oz said. It’s not clear where or whether Oz is practicing medicine as he campaigns. Columbia University, where Oz was previously on the faculty in the surgery department, said he hadn’t seen patients there since 2018. Oz’s campaign didn’t respond to an email seeking clarification.
Oz described hydroxychloroquine’s rejection as a form of cancel culture. As Oz tells it, doctors and the medical establishment were silenced into ignoring the immunosuppressant and anti-malarial drug and its possible efficacy in treating COVID. In reality, of course, the drug was studied and the government recommends against its use for the virus.
“I don’t know if it works or not,” Oz told HuffPost in a very brief interview. “I know why I talked about it, because we didn’t have any other solutions, and you march in the battle with the tools that you have.”
If a big knock against Oz from within is own party is that his positions on a host of issues are still a mystery, Oz and his team are trying to fix that. Oz emphasized that he’s against abortion, disturbed by the country’s reliance on China and opposed to deploying U.S. troops to the Ukrainian border. He said that U.S. schools are “indoctrinating” students by teaching them so-called “critical race theory,” and likened U.S. public schools, in certain instances, to Islamic religious schools.
“Some of our schools are like madrassas, basically. They’re teaching things that don’t line up with American values,” said Oz, who grew up in a Muslim family and has dual U.S-Turkish citizenship.
There were fewer blood pressure readings in Butler on Tuesday than perhaps had been advertised going into the event. Oz did one for a young woman who had “perfect” systolic pressure (the top number) and that was the extent of it.
But he was more than happy to stick around for every last photo request.
A few people from the audience told HuffPost they were impressed with Oz, and that seeing him in-person helped sell him as a real political candidate. They liked that he’s an outsider and seems genuine — the thing that many Republicans also seem to like about Trump. The former president hasn’t endorsed a second time in Pennsylvania after his earlier pick dropped out and Oz and McCormick, the hedge funder, swooped in to try and take his spot.
Everyone watching the race is expecting Trump’s endorsement to tip the scales on the Republican side, especially in places like Butler County, where Trump won 66% of the vote, and where just down the street from Oz’s venue is a home displaying signs cursing out Biden.
“I’m all about Trump, if somebody is a Trump supporter and has Trump’s endorsement,” Debbie Young, a retired 67-year-old, told HuffPost. “I heard Trump was backing McCormick, and I liked McCormick’s ads on TV. But when I heard [Oz] say a couple of things about McCormick, now I gotta do a little more research. Just because Trump is backing him doesn’t mean I’m going to, right?”
When I pointed out to Young that Trump hasn’t picked anyone yet, she didn’t really believe me.
“I read that he did, so we’ll see,” she said.
Oz, meanwhile, was wrapping up his own photo shoot before heading to another event. He jogged over to some retro-looking bowling lanes, and posed with his hands folded over a bent knee.
“Brittany, play with angles,” Oz told his communications assistant, mugging for a minute under bright lights. Oz knows his angles.
As Oz was leaving the venue, he told HuffPost about a couple, a Democrat and a Republican, whom he met earlier that day at a diner. Neither was happy with the direction of the country, or possibly something else, for reasons that Oz didn’t get into.
“I know how difficult that can be,” he said. “They’ve been married for 50 years. But they’re hopeful — they have a diagnosis. And in medicine, that doesn’t mean you have a treatment yet, but the diagnosis is the first step.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
