Vivek Ramaswamy’s desperation is showing.
That was my immediate reaction to the cringeworthy ad his campaign posted on social media and then ran on television related to the Republican’s bid for Ohio governor.
Early last week, as the campaign entered its homestretch, the ad thrust viewers into an old, painful scandal from his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s childhood.
The 60-second video features Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter “a liar,” which later prompted Acton’s brother to accuse Ramaswamy of turning childhood rape “into a political talking point.”
Conveniently omitted from the ad were the decades-old court documents offered by Acton’s campaign to show the 60-year-old state health official had been the victim of childhood sexual abuse.
Better known was her rise from childhood poverty and periods of homelessness to become the first female physician director of Ohio’s Department of Health, appointed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Among other responsibilities, she led the state’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in an ugly effort to punch holes in Acton’s impressive resume, Ramaswamy ran the ad featuring her mother, even though the two have not spoken since she and her younger brother were taken from their family when Acton was 12.
Her campaign provided records corroborating her version of her childhood trauma. As The Washington Post and other news outlets reported, court records and media clippings from that time show Acton’s mother’s second husband, Cledith Arthur, had been arrested and indicted in 1978 and charged with rape.
The arrest came after Acton’s biological father, Gerald Stearns, made a report to police, according to various media accounts. Law enforcement apparently lost track of Arthur after he left the state, and despite multiple warrants for his arrest, he died in 2004 in Pennsylvania having never been tried for raping Acton.
I’m not aware of any credible reporting that contradicts this evidence. Yet when confronted with it, Ramaswamy’s campaign persisted in the lie.
“We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke about Amy in 2020,” read a statement from spokeswoman Connie Luck, “but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”
This may be the vilest political attack ad in recent American history — which is saying a lot — but it also is the most transparently false. And this has forced some Republicans to disavow it.
Some Republicans.
To his credit, Gov. DeWine, expressed disgust. Rep. Ashley Hinson, an Iowa Republican in a close race, called it “absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican and herself a survivor of sexual abuse, termed it “disgusting.”
“I would not have run that ad,” Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican who faces former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, in another hotly contested race, said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Nonetheless, Vice President JD Vance — a native Ohioan who hails from my hometown of Middletown — huffed in a campaign appearance in Cincinnati that he was “disgusted” that some Republicans seemed to be “whining” more about the ad than what “Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”
Whining?
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In other words, how dare his GOP comrades call the ad what it is — an embarrassment to any American with a shred of human decency — when they should be falling into lockstep with Trumpian nastiness.
And calls to circle the wagons are hardly reassuring to the clear-eyed members of the GOP who see how this episode may blow back on other Republicans on the Ohio ballot next week.
They already have enough trouble with the plummeting popularity of President Donald Trump, who has insisted on making the midterm elections about himself.
Trump, known to shoot from the lip about anything that will help him to make a headline every day, fired predictable shots about the ad and about Acton in a press confrontation, expressing only a loose relationship to the facts.
“I hear the mother went very rogue on the daughter, doesn’t have a lot of respect for the daughter, and I think the mother is a witness to things, so who knows?” he said.
The president continued, “It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much, but I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”
Oh, yes, it does. It was Vivek’s campaign that produced and posted the ad.
But, as various critics have observed, the ad looks like a desperate gesture by a losing campaign. Worse, for Republicans, it makes this election about much more than the governor’s office. It pits MAGA’s politics of amoral domination against those who stand for decency and civility.
As one great Democrat, President John F. Kennedy, famously said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”
When it leads you to abandon ordinary human decency, that’s too much, even in politics.
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