Vivek Is Sick

A campaign-ending ad...for Vivek Ramaswamy

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I have made a lot of brutal ads. I’ve used opponents’ voting records, their business dealings, their lies and their own words against them, and I’ve rarely lost sleep over any of it. I’ve dug deep into the weakest signs of character, the darkest depravities, the dumbest screwups and made it into stories shown in 15 or 30 or 60 seconds.

Politics is a contact sport, and voters are entitled to know who they’re hiring. I never pulled a punch in a spot, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise now. Many of you hate me for it. I have kept the kids and spouses out of ads, especially if they’re not in the political process. (Jared and Ivanka were fair game in 2020. Barron was not. Now, that shambling dead-eyed weirdo is part of Trumpworld’s crypto scams, so his immunity is revoked.)

I once passed on oppo about a candidate’s kid being in a mental health care facility after a suicide attempt, as one ought to, and skipped using 6 hours of a candidate’s phone sex tapes because those tapes revealed some horrors from his past even I couldn’t stomach.

But anyone who spends enough years in edit bays learns that some ads come with the pin already pulled. You can feel it at the script stage. You can certainly see it in a focus group, if one uses such things to test ads now (I do not). The spot that was supposed to wound your opponent ends up telling voters something terrible about you, and once it’s out there you can’t call it back.

Vivek Ramaswamy just made one of those.

On Monday night a one-minute video appeared online with no disclaimer and no sponsor. In it Donna Arthur, Amy Acton’s birth mother, looks into the camera, calls her daughter a liar, hints that she’s unwell, and asks Ohioans not to vote for her. By Tuesday night Ramaswamy had told reporters it was an ad from his campaign, and his team said it would put $4 million behind it for the last two weeks of the race.

The ad leaves out the vital details and true history of this woman, and the sin of omission rears its hideous head. According to police and court records obtained by the Associated Press, Arthur’s husband was arrested in 1978 and charged with raping his twelve-year-old stepdaughter.

That was Amy. He was indicted, failed to show for a court date, and spent years as a fugitive. Acton’s brother says their mother stayed married to him until he died. Acton hasn’t seen her mother since they sat in a courtroom together that year.

That is the witness Ramaswamy chose.

Anyone who has tested a spot knows how this plays. Voters don’t judge the claim first. They judge the messenger. When a mother turns on her own daughter, every viewer, and every mother in particular, immediately wonders what happened in that house.

The answer is a few clicks away, and it is far worse for the sponsor than for the target. In sixty seconds the ad introduces a great many Ohioans to the most painful chapter of Acton’s life, stamps Ramaswamy’s name on it, and makes her story more believable and more sympathetic.

Never run a spot whose rebuttal is stronger than the spot.

This one’s rebuttal is a rape indictment of a minor child, decades of trauma and pain, and the cheap, low, creepy little man who would exploit it.

So why do it?

Because Vivek is in trouble. Ohio is a state Trump carried by double digits, where Democrats haven’t won a governor’s race in twenty years, and more than $120 million has been spent on Ramaswamy’s behalf. Acton has still led in the polling for the past month. The COVID attacks didn’t land, in part because Mike DeWine keeps telling everyone the decisions were his.

A campaign that feels comfortable doesn’t go looking for its opponent’s estranged mother, but some MAGA oppo goon (I think I know who, but can’t confirm yet) brought this fecal nugget to the campaign in a misplaced sense of triumph. His people are now calling this a campaign-ending moment for Acton, which is some weapons-grade wishcasting on Vivek’s part.

I don’t know which firm cut the spot, and the reporting so far hasn’t said, but I will by midday and so will you.

I do know how these decisions get made, because I’ve sat in those meetings. Someone found Donna Arthur. Someone sat her down, lit her and shaped what she said.

Someone on the senior strategy call heard the pitch and said yes, and nobody in that room had the standing or the spine to say this will destroy us.

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A Word From Our Sponsor — And Yes, That Is Exactly How “Someone Found Donna Arthur”

Reread the paragraph you just finished. Someone found Donna Arthur. Someone sat her down. Someone put a camera on her, decided she looked good enough on tape, and shaped what she would say about her own daughter.

That is not a mystery. That is an industry. The MAGA oppo-research shops that work on behalf of candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy are not Sherlock Holmes operations. They are data broker subscribers. They enter a name, click one button, and within sixty seconds a page unfurls that would make a stalker blush: current address, every prior address going back to grade school, every relative by name, every neighbor by phone number, every property owned, every license plate.

Have someone who doesn’t like you? They already know where you live.

The Independent reported this year on a woman who’d barely used social media. A stalker still found her home, her relatives, her workplace — all from a single name search on a data broker site.

These sites don’t ask why someone is looking. They just answer. Your address. Your family members. Your daily patterns. Available to anyone — an angry ex, a stranger, someone who just didn’t like something you posted.

Or a $4-million oppo-ad vendor working off a candidate’s shopping list. Or whichever one of Vivek’s goons typed “Donna Arthur Ohio” into a search box last month. Or the ICE contractor cross-referencing against your donor history. Or Blanche’s Payback Squad building the next grand jury out of your Instagram feed.

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Take yourself off the market before the next oppo goon decides the worst moment of your life would make a nice $4 million ad buy.

Now, back to Vivek’s smoldering remains.

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Then, after Republicans as well as Democrats spent a full day telling them it was poison, someone recommended spending $4 million more on it. Shamelessness may be a superpower, but stupidity is kryptonite.

A bad call is a mistake. Doubling down after an entire state has told you it was a bad call is a failure of judgment so complete that I’d question whether those people should be trusted with a client’s money again. His own primary opponent, Casey Putsch, now says he’s voting for Acton. That is what this ad has bought so far.

The Acton campaign’s answer was exactly right.

They didn’t put Amy on camera to defend herself, which would have forced her to relive it on command and kept the story about her. They put up her brother, Philip Stearns, who lived through the same childhood. He says Amy took the brunt of it. He confirms the family really was homeless. He’s a family member answering for a family member, and he carries a moral authority the woman he’s answering gave up decades ago.

It went up the same day. The question shifted from whether Amy Acton is lying to what kind of man would do this, and her campaign didn’t have to say one word about Ramaswamy’s character to get there.

There are attacks a candidate can recover from. Voters forgive harsh policy ads and even cheap shots, and winners go on to govern.

This isn’t one of those. Win or lose, Vivek Ramaswamy will be the candidate who took a woman’s childhood abuse and made it his closing argument. He told reporters he has never met Acton or her mother, as if that settles it.

And really, that is the worst part. He looked at the darkest moment in the life of a woman he doesn’t know and saw a media buy.

Four million dollars will get him plenty of airtime.

There’s no amount of money in this work that will make Vivek Ramaswamy a man fit to lead the people of Ohio.

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