Ramaswamy should pull the Acton ad, not just shorten it

Opinion

By Thomas Greer

The Middle Seat — a column from the political center

A shorter ad is not a better ad. Vivek Ramaswamy should take down the spot built around Amy Acton’s estranged mother, not because anyone can force him to, but because he is the one candidate in Ohio’s governor’s race who can end this episode on his own terms.

What the ad says, and what it leaves out

The facts are not in much dispute. Ramaswamy’s campaign put roughly $4 million behind a statewide buy for a minute-long ad in which Donna Arthur calls her daughter, the Democratic nominee, a “liar” and urges Ohioans not to vote for her, NBC News reported. The ad does not mention why mother and daughter are estranged. Acton has said she was sexually abused by her mother’s husband, and her brother, Philip Stearns, publicly backed her account, writing that their “birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” Acton has said she has not seen or spoken to her mother in nearly 50 years.

The campaign is now switching to a 30-second version of the ad, NBC News reported, citing a person close to the campaign. Trimming the length leaves the problem where it was. The central message is still a stranger to the voter telling them that a woman’s mother has vouched against her, with the context that would let the voter weigh that testimony left on the cutting-room floor.

The criticism came from his own side

This is not a story of Democrats crying foul. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who has endorsed Ramaswamy and still does, said the ad “on its face, is deeply, deeply troubling” and that “it’s wrong to run this ad,” urging the campaign “to take this down.” Sen. Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican, said he “would not have run that ad.” Those are not people looking for an excuse to abandon the Republican ticket. They are Ohio Republicans with long records in statewide politics telling the nominee that he has misjudged their state.

The best case for keeping it

The defenders’ arguments deserve a fair hearing, and some of them land.

The first is about fairness. Ramaswamy spokesperson Connie Luck said DeWine “is correct that the first and only candidate to attack the mother of her opponent in this race was Amy Acton,” and she argued that the press applies a double standard because Democrats “have regularly used family members of President Trump, RFK Jr., and other Republicans in ads.” If that is the standard, Acton’s side is not in a position to claim clean hands, and voters are entitled to hear that.

The second is about candor. President Donald Trump called it a “very powerful Ad” on Truth Social. Vice President JD Vance, who held this state’s Senate seat until last year, put it more bluntly: “Politics is a tough business, and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.” There is something to that. Campaigns are not seminars, and the Republicans in Columbus have every right to fight hard for the governor’s office.

Why it should still come down

But the double-standard argument is an argument about other people’s ads, not this one. If Acton’s campaign was wrong to bring Ramaswamy’s mother into the race, the answer is to say so, loudly, and let voters judge. It is not to escalate with an ad that puts an estranged parent on screen while leaving out what the candidate and her brother have said about why the family broke apart. Voters can weigh a hard-hitting ad. They cannot weigh what they are not told.

And the “tough business” point cuts both ways. Toughness in politics is taking on an opponent’s record, which in Acton’s case is plentiful: her tenure as state health director during the pandemic, her policy platform, her judgment. That is where Ramaswamy has a real argument to make, and a Republican with his talents should want the race decided there. A spot that turns on a family estrangement does not show toughness. It shows a campaign reaching for something other than the case it can make on the merits.

There is also a practical point for a party that wants to keep winning statewide in Ohio. The voters a statewide Republican needs to win over in the closing days are not the ones already cheering the ad, and a spot that looks like a cheap shot is a strange way to court them. When the sitting Republican governor and a Republican senator say they would not have run the ad, the campaign should take that as a free piece of polling advice.

The off-ramp

Ramaswamy does not need anyone’s permission to pull the ad, and he would not be conceding anything if he did. He could say, accurately, that both campaigns should leave the candidates’ mothers out of it from here to Election Day, Nov. 3, and challenge Acton to agree. That would put the race back on the issues, give him the high ground he has been arguing he deserves, and let DeWine campaign for him without an asterisk.

The campaign has already shown it is willing to change the ad. The better edit is the one that takes it off the air.

Photo: Sixflashphoto / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.

Thomas Greer is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from a moderate / independent perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.