Oz slams Fetterman for ‘head fake’ debate offer

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz put his midterm foe, John Fetterman, on blast for issuing a “head fake” offer for a debate that is likely to occur after Pennsylvanians begin casting early votes.

Following weeks of intensifying pressure on Fetterman to debate Oz, the lieutenant governor finally relented this week and loosely committed to a showdown with the celebrity doctor despite his stroke-induced ailments. Oz had ramped up pressure on Fetterman to appear opposite him in a public forum, but he was left despondent with the debate offer.

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“There is no John Fetterman debate offer. Debates have to be held at a specific time, a specific place. They have to have a host; you got to have a TV station. We don’t have any of these details,” Oz countered during an interview with Fox News’s Harris Faulkner on Friday. “He just dropped his head fake idea that ‘yeah, of course I’ll do a debate.'”

Oz and Fetterman are embroiled in one of the hottest Senate races in the country that could determine the balance of power in the evenly split upper chamber. Days before Fetterman clinched the Democratic nod for outgoing Sen. Pat Toomey’s (R) Senate seat, the lieutenant governor suffered a stroke that nearly killed him.

Fetterman stayed out of the political spotlight until August as he recovered. While he has insisted his “health now is robust,” he has conceded that he “might miss a word every now and then or I might mush two words together,” which has made his allies uneasy about a debate.

“We’re absolutely going to debate Dr. Oz, and that was really always our intent to do that,” Fetterman told Politico. “All of these debates have always occurred in the middle to late October.”

Aware of Fetterman’s rhetorical hindrances, his campaign had long been noncommittal about debate plans. Oz seized on the opening, ribbing him for hiding from voters, as he scrambles to close a considerable polling gap in the crucial battleground race. Oz claims to have accepted six debate offers.

Fetterman’s campaign has shot back at Oz, blasting his team for making it “abundantly clear that they think it is funny to mock a stroke survivor,” something from which Oz has sought to distance himself.

“I have tremendous empathy for John Fetterman’s struggle with the stroke, the heart failure that has been around, we are now told, for five years, but he hasn’t told me or anybody else the details that we would need to know,” Oz continued. “This is not about health. [Fetterman’s] trying to make it about health so people feel sorry for him. This is about honesty and integrity.”

Oz left his razor-thin primary fight with David McCormick badly bruised, with disaffected Republican voters uneasy about his conservative bona fides. He then faced an onslaught of scathing ads and digital swipes from Fetterman’s campaign caricaturing him as a carpetbagger and out-of-touch rich celebrity while the Democrat recovered from his stroke.

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Oz is trailing Fetterman by 6.5 percentage points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling, but the gap appears to have shrunk in recent weeks as Republicans coalesce behind Oz.

“We’re gaining rapidly. Over the summer, [Fetterman] took advantage of the fact that he had a lot of money saved up from his primary, and he was attacking me daily,” Oz continued. “I’m optimistic, confident that we will prevail in November.”