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The Dr. Oz team has gone where — Cockburn sincerely hopes — no other campaign has ventured before (or will again): on the attack against “bros.”
Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick is challenging Oz for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat, and Oz’s latest attack ad (they’ve been airing more relentlessly than MyPillow commercials in Pennsylvania) is particularly off-putting. It doesn’t so much deride McCormick himself as it does a whole class of people. A fairly inoffensive one, at that.
McCormick chose China over Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/Sj1MVqDux3
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) March 23, 2022
The ad begins with two thirty-something guys (“Chad” and “Tad”) identifying themselves as “finance bros.” They’re dressed identically in Oxford button downs and vests and are shown sharing laughs and drinking at a bar while they explain McCormick is also a “finance bro” and their “hero.” Comparing him to Leonardo DiCaprio’s sex, booze and cash-crazed character in The Wolf of Wall Street, the finance bros label McCormick the “Wolf of Westport…Connecticut” and drink to his honor.
The wince-worthy satire continues as the pair feign to fawn over McCormick for being “China’s bro” and sending jobs overseas. “Investing in foreign adversaries always pays!” they exclaim. Chad also mocks McCormick for making money, ending the ad with a painful ditty that makes Mitt Romney’s rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” sound like a masterful aria.
Cockburn was left puzzled by this ad. For starters, the segment is inexplicably stylized with the soundtrack and title font of the popular sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Why? That show is about… lower-middle-class friends who run a bar in Philadelphia. Not finance bros.
Next, who is Oz’s intended audience? People who hate “bros”? Do rural voters, far removed from finance bro culture, associate anything with bros at all, let alone something decidedly negative? Cockburn has often found members of this stereotype to be fun-loving (they make excellent drinking buddies), a little vacant, yes, but in a lovable, boyish way that’s frequently too simplistic to be malicious. Bros are, in a word, likable, which, last time Cockburn checked, was a huge factor in winning an election.
What’s more, several of the charges Oz brings against McCormick could just as easily apply to Oz himself. The “McCormick is rich” jibe doesn’t do the same damage when it’s lodged by a television star worth an estimated $100 million. Likewise, accusing McCormic, who was at least born and raised in Pennsylvania, of being a political carpetbagger is a bold choice considering Oz was born in Ohio, lived in New Jersey for a long time and now, reports PennLive.com, “is renting his in-laws’ home in an affluent Philadelphia suburb” (making it even odder that the Oz campaign opted for an Always Sunny shtick).
Furthermore, Cockburn takes special issue with the two other mostly harmless targets of this attack ad: vests and hard seltzer. Cockburn never met an alcoholic beverage he didn’t like, and he’s partial to a vest. They keep him warm in the early spring without impairing his ability to swill the hard stuff.
This new ad left Cockburn with a bad taste in his mouth — and evidently several Twitter users relate.
Until the next round of cringey mudslinging appears, Cockburn will be left associating Dr. Oz with two insanely annoying C-grade actors and equating McCormick to Leo DiCaprio.
Cockburn thinks Oz can probably do better than labeling his political rival a “bro.” And he knows Oz certainly can’t do any worse than this ad.
