The flailing John Fetterman campaign has now clung to the desperate tactic of accusing Dr. Mehmet Oz of being a Dallas Cowboys fan to win votes.
On Tuesday, John Fetterman tweeted a billboard that will face both directions on the Philadelphia highway near the Eagles stadium, accusing his Republican opponent of being a fan of the Eagles’ much-hated NFC East rival.
“Now that Dr. Oz is running for office, he *acts* like he’s a real Philly sports fan. But we all know he’s really a Cowboys fan,” Fetterman tweeted. “Our beautiful new billboard at the Linc won’t let you Iggles fans forget it.”
The billboard will remain up through this coming Sunday night’s game between the Eagles and the Cowboys. In 2013, long before Dr. Oz entered politics, he tweeted a photo of himself tipping the football over the field goalposts at the Cowboys’ stadium. “Doing my best to audition for the Cowboys while we have access to their facility during my 15 Minute Physical,” he captioned.
The John Fetterman campaign told The Hill that the new billboard further highlights Oz’s status as a carpetbagger in Pennsylvania, even though a recent poll showed the effect of that attack had lost its flavor among likely voters.
“The fact that Oz is willing to sell out his supposed Eagles fandom for clout when he’s in Dallas may be a funny example of his inability to take real positions and hold consistent beliefs, but it’s much more than that,” Brendan McPhillips, Fetterman’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
“This gets to the heart of who this guy really is. He pretends to be a Cowboys fan when he’s in Dallas, but now that he’s running for office, he tailgates at Eagles games like he’s a real Philly fan,” added McPhillips.
While Fetterman might think voters are shallow enough to hinge their vote on football tribalism, Dr. Oz has actually slowly narrowed the gap between him and his Democrat opponent since the summer, largely due to Fetterman’s ailing mental state after suffering a stroke. Even NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns admitted that Fetterman has difficulty with basic speech and comprehension following an in-person interview.
“We had a monitor set up so he could read my questions because he still has lingering auditory processing issues as a result of the stroke, which means he has a hard time understanding what he’s hearing. Now, once he reads the question, he’s able to understand. You’ll hear he also still has some problems, some challenges with speech. I’ll say that just in some of the small talk prior to the interview before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations,” Burns told MSNBC.