Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. John Fetterman has announced that he will debate reality TV's Mehmet Oz. Both are candidates for an open US senate seat in Pennsylvania. Fetterman explained that lingering auditory issues from a stroke he is recovering from made participation in a debate tricky, but they have found ways around it.
I had assumed he wasn't going to debate Oz because Oz is a waste of time.
"We're just exploring that," he said of the closed captioning. "I have every ability to talk about all of these issues and have a full debate. And that's really just the one lingering issue of the stroke — that some of my hearing was damaged a little bit, but it's continuing to get better and better and better every day."
Oz, who is trailing Fetterman in the polls, has for weeks sought to portray the Democrat as skipping debates either because he can't defend his record or is too ill to go onstage. The attacks have sometimes been ugly, with one Oz aide saying that Fetterman might not have suffered a stroke if he'd ever eaten vegetables, a statement that the celebrity doctor later distanced himself from.
