The campaign for John Fetterman recently a desperate tactic to win votes by accusing Dr. Mehmet Oz of being a Dallas Cowboys fan.
This week, Fetterman tweeted about a billboard that faces both directions along the Philadelphia highway close to the Eagles stadium. The billboard will accuse his Republican opponent of being a supporter of the Eagles’ much-disliked 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,” he tweeted. “Our beautiful new billboard at the Linc won’t let you Iggles fans forget it.”
The billboard will be up until Sunday's football match of both the Eagles and the Cowboys. In 2013, well ahead of the time Oz entered politics, he tweeted a picture of himself kicking the ball over the field goalposts in the Cowboys stadium. “Doing my best to audition for the Cowboys while we have access to their facility during my 15 Minute Physical,” the caption reads.
The Fetterman campaign told The Hill that the billboard shows Oz isn’t really from Pennsylvania, a poll revealed that the negative impact of that attack was fading away in the eyes of 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,” Fetterman's campaign director Brendan McPhillips said in an announcement.
“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,” he added.
Although Fetterman may think that people base their decisions on football-related tribalism, but Dr. Oz has actually slowly diminished the gap between him and Fetterman in the past few months, largely because of his opponents’ ailing mental health after suffering a stroke. In fact, NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns acknowledged Fetterman struggles in basic speech and understanding after an interview in person.
“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.
