An open letter to candidates Vivek Ramaswamy, Amy Acton, Jon Husted, and Sherrod Brown; to V-PAC, Ohioans for Lower Costs, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), and the other groups now buying the airtime in Ohio
What are you thinking? Seriously, do you hear yourselves?
You are not obscure people. One of you is a physician who served in a governor’s cabinet. One of you built impressive companies and ran for president. One of you is a sitting United States senator. One of you spent decades in the Senate and is asking Ohio to send you back. Your biographies are full of the ordinary marks of accomplishment: licenses, earnings, elections, public service in high office. None of that should require you to invent a scandal in a thirty-second spot to win an election.
And yet the ads running in your names, or in the names of committees that exist to elect you, keep choosing the invented versions.
A pro-Ramaswamy advertisement told voters that Dr. Acton’s medical training was “insufficient,” that she admitted to drug addiction or an alcohol problem, and that police later caught her mixing alcohol and prescription drugs days after she told the medical board she was “clean.” The “insufficient” note was one supervisor’s comment on a four-month internship in 1990, before she was licensed; a later evaluation on the same application called her knowledge excellent. The 1994 form bundled emotional illness, drug addiction, and alcohol into a single question, and on the separate question about dependency she answered “no”. The police call was months later, not days later. Officers recorded a verbal dispute and made no arrest. Being loud enough to upset neighbors maybe rude, it’s not usually a crime. I have now taken the time to walked through the documents. You and/or your advertisers did, too. I don’t understand your slanderous need to lie.
On the other side, Dr Acton, a Democratic Governors Association–backed ad called Mr. Ramaswamy a conman who made hundreds of millions “scamming desperate seniors” with an Alzheimer’s drug he knew did not work. The drug failed in late-stage trials. It was never approved and never sold to patients. Investors lost money, that happens in business. Patients were not peddled a bottle. Seemingly promising drugs fail in clinical trials, 90% of them. That is a real business failure, it is not the crime the commercial describes. Mr. Ramaswamy is no Elizabeth Holmes, he has brought no less than 9 medications successfully through FDA trials which, among other things, have saved lives of infants and children born with otherwise nearly always fatal congenital athymia. Those babies, and their families, don’t think he’s a drug pushing conman.
In the Senate race the same habit shows up in sharper form.
Democratic ads cut “FirstEnergy spent millions bribing public officials” against “one prominent name keeps coming up, Sen. Jon Husted,” and place him “at the center” of the largest corruption scheme in state history. He backed House Bill 6. Company money reached groups that helped his campaigns. He has not been charged with taking a bribe. The man who was sentenced was the former House speaker. FactCheck.org’s point was simple: accurate sentences, arranged to leave a false impression, are still a false impression. The claim that the bailout alone “cost you thousands” on electric bills leans on a rise that analysts attribute more to demand and energy markets than to a law that has mostly been rolled back.
Republican ads have been no more careful with Mr. Brown. One said a family of three died on I-71 because he “opened our borders to dangerous illegals.” The driver was a naturalized United States citizen. There is no evidence a Brown vote caused that crash. PolitiFact and FactCheck.org both said so. Another spot said he supports “forcing childhood sex change surgery.” He does not. A third stretched “Epstein associates” until the label covered donors with thin or disputed ties, while a Brown ad did its own stretching in the other direction with Les Wexner’s donations.
This is not a dispute about emphasis. Campaigns have always argued about records. It is a dispute about whether a sentence has to be true, a prospective office holder honest.
You may say the other side started it. You may claim voters only respond to negatives. You will say the super PAC is independent and you cannot control it. The first two are descriptions of the incentive, not a defense. The third is the oldest dodge in the business. A candidate who will not denounce a lie told on his behalf has adopted it. An “independent” committee that exists to elect one person is not a stranger to that person.
Ohio is not short of real arguments. Shutdown authority during COVID sat with the governor, not Dr. Acton, and voters can decide what they think of the advice Mike DeWine took. A failed drug trial is a fair subject if you describe the trial honestly. Data-center tax breaks, Medicaid work rules, tariffs, and House Bill 6 are all in the public record. You could run on those and still hit hard. You are choosing, instead, the version that only works if the viewer does not look up the footnote or does not care for the truth
Honorable is not a title you keep by having held an office or built a company. It is a habit: you do not say what you know is not so, and you do not stand quietly beside the people who untrue things
for you.
That habit, honor, can still be recovered. The election is not over. Early voting is only beginning. The spots already aired cannot be un-aired, but the next buy is a choice, and the choice is still yours.
Stop pretending that Ohio voters are stupid, or that we lack compassion. Neither one of these things is true.
Pull the ads that invent a dependency, a scam against patients, a bribery charge, a cause of death, or a surgery mandate. Correct them in public and ask the committees spending in your favor to do the same. Replace them with the argument you are willing to defend in a room where someone has the documents. If the case is strong, it will survive the edit. If it only works after the dates are moved and the qualifiers are cut, it was never a case.
One campaign doing this will look exposed for a week. Two campaigns doing it would change the month. Voters are not asking you to go soft. They are asking you to be accurate. That is a lower bar than exists for the offices you are seeking, and it is still within reach.
You can turn this advertising in a different direction. Nothing in the calendar prevents it. Nothing in your records requires the false version. The only thing standing between these ads and an honest campaign is the decision, which you have not yet had to make for the last time.
Make it and make Ohio a better place for you, for all of us.
Respectfully,
Michael S Spillan
A voter who would rather be persuaded than managed.
P.S. To Norm Wernet, president of the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans: I am sorry for your wife’s suffering and your pain. My own mother suffered from dementia and you have my most profound sympathy. Please understand that you do her and yourself a great disservice with your mischaracterizations. I don’t doubt that you believe them, I was once the Crowned Prince of self deception, and I recognize it plainly in others. Please reconsider your words, the facts give lie to them and I think you are better than that. Our Ohio State University is participating in almost 1,000 clinical trials at this time. People hope to get better because of them, 850-925 of them will fail. 500 of them will be complete failures.
To Soren Aldeco: The same basically applies to you, except that your ads imply that you were a helpless child subject to forces beyond your control …somehow related to Ohio and Sherrod Brown, who has said that such decisions should be made by parents, people and their doctors. Not by the state. You were 17, and by all accounts able and intelligent when you began hormone therapy. You were 19, a legal adult under the law of Texas (where you lived), when you had the elective double mastectomy and that decision you made as a adult. You have never lived in Ohio.
Norm, Soren, I believe you are suffering, truly. I also believe your suffering is being sustained and extended by self-deception and – to some degree- misplaced projection of responsibility for that suffering onto others who had no obvious role in it. You’ve recovered from the people allegedly responsible for your decisions, it’s time to move on.
Norm, Soren, get help, I did and healed. You can, too. I’m praying for you. Mike.