F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously observed that the truest test “of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
But the sage of the Jazz Age never had to run for office. And, more specifically, he didn’t have to run in Pennsylvania’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race, where it barely seems possible to hold a single idea in mind for longer than it takes to run a 30-second attack ad.
And that’s a loss to the voters because an issue that deserves genuine discussion — fixing a broken prison system and furthering the cause of criminal justice reform so that people don’t return to jail — has been lost in a sea of sharp-elbowed rhetoric.
If you have not seen them — and this is hard to imagine, since they’ve been inescapable — Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, the Trump-endorsed celebrity physician, has managed to close a double-digit polling gap with Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a reform advocate who chairs the state Pardons Board, with a series of commercials, aired by his campaign and by GOP allies, that prey on voters’ worst impulses with barely concealed dog whistles.
The strategy is hardly original. Nor is it particularly unique.
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