After trailing John Fetterman in the polls for weeks in the Pennsylvania Senate race, Dr. Mehmet Oz has pulled ahead by four points in one new poll, 49.1%-44.6%, with independents largely breaking for Oz. RealClearPolitics is also now predicting that Oz will win. I’m not sure if this is due to polls becoming more accurate or voters just coming to their senses.  

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/10/23/oz-takes-the-lead-in-new-poll-n1639239

A lot of people are treating the Oz-Fetterman race as something of an outlier or sideshow, a race between a TV celebrity and…whatever Fetterman is. But the more I think about it, the more I believe this race actually provides a perfect microcosm of the two major political parties in 2022.

On the Republican side is someone who went to medical school, a difficult field unrelated to politics. He studied, worked hard and became very successful. But he became concerned that leftist elites were destroying the country he loved, so he decided to give up his lucrative private sector career for a while to go to Washington and help to fix their mess, exactly as the Founders intended Congressional public service to be.

On the Democrat side, we have someone who admits he mostly “sleepwalked” through his youth. His master’s degree is in “public policy.” He’s never started a business or earned any wealth, but is contemptuous of those who have. He was supported by his parents for much of his life. He’s covered in tattoos and doesn’t know how to dress himself like a mature adult. His political career involved continually failing upward, from part-time mayor of a distressed town that’s more distressed now than when he found it, to lieutenant governor who championed leftist policies like legalizing pot and releasing criminals from prison, to Senate candidate. Oh, and there’s a good chance he might actually be brain damaged.

If those two stories don’t perfectly represent today’s parties, I don’t know what does.