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T h e
Political
L i f e
o f D r. O ZNobody on the right appears to care.
Parnell made his exit official on Novem-
ber 22, and eight days later Dr. Oz was in
the race, advertising himself with a combi-
nation ofmagaslogans, medical puns, and
references to his own brand. “Pennsylvania
needs a conservative who will put America
first,” he said. Why was he running? Well,
he wouldn’t put it that way. In his words,
he was “stepping forward to help cure our
country’s ills” because “America’s heartbeat
is in a code red in need of a defibrillator to
shock it back to life.” What was his vision for
the state? “It all starts with YOU!” he said,
a nod to his successfulYOUbook series—
YOU: The Owner’s Manual;YOU: Being
Beautiful;YOU: Losing Weight; and so on.
But even at his most right-wing sound-
ing, he still sounded nuanced—not a posi-
tive in this primary race. “The best thing he
has going for him is his relationship with
Hannity. The influencer types are not fans
of him, so it’s a matter of ‘How much does
that permeate into the grass roots?’ ” a con-
servative operative said.
That work with the grass roots happens
at the levels below Hannity and often out of
sight of television cameras. It means iden-
tifying the influencers and then identifying
who is influencing the influencers and then
doing your best to influence them. “If I was
him, I’d be going to The Daily Caller and
Breitbart and The Federalist and doing off-
the-records, getting to know these people,”
the conservative operative said. Trump
relied on consultants, wacky and anti-
professional, who at least knew that much.
On Fox News recently, Dr. Oz was asked
the kind of obvious-to-arise question con-
sultants are paid to coach a candidate to
answer. He smirked and nodded as the host
wound up: “What is your position as both a
doctor and a senatorial candidate on when
life begins? When should we draw the line
when abortion is legal?”
Dr. Oz seemed prepared, and he rattled
off his answer quickly. “As a doctor, I appre-
ciate the sanctity of life, and for that rea-
son I’m strongly pro-life with the three
exceptions I’ve mentioned. That’s how
I would vote,” he said. (The exceptions are
cases of rape or incest or when the life of
the mother is at stake. Many pro-life con-servatives reject these exceptions.) “And
when does that life begin?” the Fox News
host asked. Dr. Oz made a smacking sound
with his lips. “Again, if I’m pro-life, then
that’s a decision that com–comes back to
the fss-sanctity of when you think life does
begin—” He spoke in a sputtering way,
moving his head and raising his shoulders
and releasing them in a subtle defensive
manner, as if to convey that the correctness
of his views was obvious and further ques-
tions were not needed. “And I believe that it
begins when you’re in the mother’s womb.”
The Fox News host was not pleased by
this answer. His expression turned sour and
judgmental. “When you’re in the mother’s
womb? That carries you all the way up to
nine months’ pregnancy,” he said. Dr. Oz
did his best to recover. “No, of course not.
Life’s already started when you’re in your
mother’s womb,” he said. He tried to pivot
the discussion away from the technicalities
on which he was being quizzed. “But it’s a
rathole to get trapped in the different ways
of talking about it,” he said.
All the expensive strategists and consul-
tants Dr. Oz has hired from the Republi-
can Establishment and the “Never Trump”
movement did not foresee, or did not appro-
priately assess, the threat of a challenger
emerging to snap up the maga supporters
Dr. Oz assumed would be rightfully his. That
candidate, David McCormick, is expected
to formally enter the race “imminently,”
according to his advisers. A Washington,
Pennsylvania, native raised in Bloomsburg,
McCormick graduated from West Point,
fought in the Gulf War, then served in
George W. Bush’s White House. Although
he worked and lived in Pittsburgh for a
time, like Dr. Oz he has spent recent years
elsewhere, and in the 2020 election, he was
registered to vote in Connecticut. Alongside
Dr. Oz’s friend Ray Dalio, he runs Bridge-
water Associates, the world’s largest hedge
fund. In 2019, McCormick married Dina
Powell, the Goldman Sachs girlboss who
briefly served in the Trump White House,
where she befriended key Trump advisers.
On paper, there’s at least as much of a
Trumpist case against a globalist money guy
as there is against a celebrity who took part
in the Obama White House’s anti-obesity
campaign, yet it’s McCormick who seems
primed to collect the support of everyone
from Bannon to the vest-wearing Repub-
licans who threw their weight behind the
recent victor in Virginia. Trump White
House veterans Hope Hicks and Cliff Sims
are expected to take formal roles in the
campaign, and others from the administra-
tion have encouraged him to enter the race.
In Trumpworld, McCormick is widely
seen as a man with an inconvenient back-
ground who might pan out anyway. “I hateSIGN UP
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