Let’s get one thing straight right off the top: In my very humble opinion, Vivek Ramaswamy is a thoroughly unqualified, opportunistic scumbag. I had that opinion long before his handlers chose to make the clearly Stockholm Syndrome-suffering mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, the face of the campaign that at this writing shows him trailing by -2.6 percentage points according to Pollsmax, which for my money as an aggregator of more than 30 polls and tens of thousands of respondents is about as accurate and unbiased as they come in that world. Take a more detailed look if you don’t believe me. In a state which the head of his party carried by more than 11 percentage points two years ago that’s a cause for deep concern.
That said, nine days from the actual election Acton holds a mere plurality and a margin barely enough to be deemed statistically significant. And it’s not as if Ramaswamy actually had any sort of actual track record as an elected public official to draw from. Lest us not forget that his previous attempt at running for office, as a noisy disruptor for the 2024 Republican presidential ticket during a brief period where the toddler-in-chief was actually not fully committed, resulted in him lasting about as long in the primary process as Kamala Harris did in hers during 2020. In today’s world, that of course means he’s fully qualified for a comeback.
Yes, I’m as appalled as anyone by this October surprise which even the homogenized description offered yesterday by NEWSWEEK’s James Bickerton couldn’t quite conceal the odiousness of:
Earlier this month Ramaswamy’s campaign released an advert featuring Donna Arthur, Amy Acton’s mother, talking about her estranged daughter. In the video Arthur says: “I love my daughter but when I saw her lying about her opponent, and it’s not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar, she lies about her past. Acton has previously said she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child and removed from her mother’s custody at age 12. This account has been supported by Acton’s brother Philip Stearns., ”
And no, I won’t quite stoop to the level of callous defensiveness that Ramaswamy himself chose yesterday in solidarity with his Lord and master and the other Ohio native with an Ivy League education and an Asian wife who emerged as the party’s leader-in-waiting after Vivek crapped out. Bickerton also brought that to light:
After members of his own party said he should stop airing a controversial ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s campaign said it would spend $4 million to air it through Election Day. Speaking to supporters at the Strongsville Pancake Breakfast on Oct. 23, Ramaswamy said he wouldn’t bend to the pressure he’s received to stop running it…Trump has defended the ad and encouraged Ramaswamy to keep airing it. Vice President JD Vance, a former senator from Ohio, has criticized Republicans he accused of “whining” about the spot.
But I will ask a couple of burning questions:
For one, considering Acton actually had held an office where she has dealt first-hand with what Ohio voters are claiming is their number one priority–affordability of health care–and currently holds a substantially larger margin on that particular issue, what campaign advisor thought it was such a brilliant idea to bring up her childhood pain as a talking point in the first place?
And to those voters for whom this actually does matter–what did you expect from a Republican candidate to begin with?
Long before Trump and Vance commandeered the minds and souls of the GOP the strategists of that era chose the gaslighting route for a campaign where an mediocre candidate was having trouble breaking through the usual cycle of banter. Remember Willie Horton? Wikipedia sure does:
Having been convicted of a 1974 robbery and murder, Horton absconded from a Massachusetts prison furlough program in 1986.[2] In 1987, while on the run, Horton committed kidnapping, armed robbery, and rape in Maryland. During the 1988 U.S. presidential election, Vice President and Republican nominee George H. W. Bush brought Horton up frequently during his campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis who was the governor of Massachusetts, and whom Bush claimed was responsible for Horton’s release on furlough.
That was seen as the turning point that tipped the scales in favor of Bush and reduced Dukakis to a punch line and the defining moment of Jon Lovitz’ comedic career. Given that he was just starting out his own political journey at roughly the same time, I’d suspect the guy that eventually returned the White House to the Democrats was aware of all of that. Maybe that’s why he was so in a tizzy yesterday when he finally decided to help Acton out, as THE DAILY BEAST’s Farrah Tomazin duly noted this morning:
Acton appeared onstage with Barack Obama in Cleveland, where the former president delivered a scorched-earth rebuke of Ramaswamy, saying there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do to get into the limelight. “There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, ‘No office is worth stooping that low,’” Obama said of the Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate.
Perhaps. But at roughly the same time as the Horton lesson was being taught I got my own schooling as to how low someone might stoop in pursuit of a win in the far lower-stakes world of TV syndication thanks to Ted Knight.
Knight had been starring in the sitcom TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT, the first of what eventually became an onslaught of such shows produced for first-run syndication. TOO CLOSE had aired for three years on ABC as a reasonably high-rated but prematurely cancelled show when the network had a surplus of even more successful fare and returned pretty much intact on its way to the magical 100-episode mark deemed necessary for rerun sale. But when ratings slipped and that goal been achieved producers decided to cut costs and shift gears by writing out Ted’s comely daughters and making him an editor of a small Marin County newspaper, retitling it THE TED KNIGHT SHOW in the process. Those revamped episodes began airing in the spring of 1986, just before news of Knight’s cancer became public. During a planned summer rerun cycle, Knight passed away. In the real world, this is considered tragedy. In syndication, it’s considered opportunity.
Even though stations were committed to airing the show they were not necessarily committed to airing it in a premium top slot, so every company in the business took the chance to pitch stations that were airing TED KNIGHT for their own projects to supplant it knowing its future was non-existant. Two candidates with similar pedigrees were IT’S A LIVING, a short-lived ABC comedy that had debuted the previous fall with new episodes to adequate ratings and whose distribution rights had just been taken over by the aggressive team at Lorimar-Telepictures. My team was hawking the reboot of 9 TO 5. And in a pre-Internet world that meant churning out regular mailers with bar graphs and cheesy headlines that would hopefully attract attention on a cluttered decision makers’ desk. It also meant an opportunistic salesman with a good client relationship could wind up with a competitor’s piece in their hands. That’s how I got my grubby little paws on a piece whose headline still screams in my head to this day:
IT’S A LIVING KILLS TED KNIGHT!!!
It was poor timing and a needless way to overshadow an otherwise underwhelming head-to-head performance in an isolated market. We are appalled and offended by it–nowhere near as much as the programmer who willingly shared it with us. The reaction was pretty much in the same vein as what I’ve been seeing from just about every other e-mail and sh-tposter over the past week to the choices that the Ramaswamy campaign has made.
Yet as my superiors at the time reminded us in the same chiding way as the Republican leaders are now it’s all in the pursuit of victory. We were encouraged to do a knock piece to counter it. We chose to attack the data story rather than the headline, because amplifying it any further would have only achieved the goal of continuing a conversation that no one was particularly comfortable with and that ultimately didn’t really matter in the first place.
Sort of a shame Obama, Acton and the Democratic braintrust didn’t have that note.
But lest one think I’m forever a gloomy Gus I’ll leave you with this: 9 TO 5 got that plum time slot, and IT’S A LIVING wound up on a competing station delivering about half the rating our show did. Basically what THE TED KNIGHT SHOW was doing as its lame duck lead-out.
Please, let’s all keep hope alive.
Until next time…