Frankie Machine

If you're not careful, this whole Vivek Ramaswamy political ad scandal will make you crazy the more you think about it. Because the candidate Mr. Ramaswamy isn't accused of sexual abuse. None of his staffers or his family or his top donors are accused of sexual abuse. There is zero correlation between his campaign and the sexual abuse that occurred. Think about that. No, this whole thing is because Mr. Ramaswamy's team thought it'd be a great idea to run an ad featuring the mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, and apparently no one did sufficient vetting or seem to have cared about what they found. At minimum, his team didn't think to ask: "Huh... so, you, uh, mentioned in passing you haven't seen your daughter in 48 years. That would have put her at age 12, right? That's kinda odd. Uh... what happened?" And then the info comes out that her estranged mother lost custody of 12-year-old Ms. Acton and her younger brother in 1978 because her husband--their stepfather--sexually abused her daughter. And the stepfather fled the state that year and several warrants (plural) were out for his arrest over the sexual abuse. And then it's revealed the stepfather was previously prosecuted for raping his own daughter. His team looked at all this and you'd think they'd be like: "Well... shit. That's a ton of legal evidence that her mother is a raging sociopath. We really didn't think this one through. This is bad. Let's figure out how to salvage this disaster." But no! Mr. Ramaswamy decides to spend all week defending the ad of his opponent's mother who hasn't had contact with his opponent in 50 years since she lost custody over sexual abuse. And then esterday, Mike DeWine, the Republican Gov. of Ohio, calls on Mr. Ramaswamy to remove the ad and said "it's deeply troubling." So, you gotta figure Mr. Ramaswamy is finally gonna pull the plug on this disastrous and bizarre dumpster fire. But no! Mr. Ramaswamy sees that the ad has vocal support from deeply unpopular Donald Trump, noted rapist and alleged pedophile, and thinks to himself: "Yes, Rapey Don is right. I should keep up the child sexual abuse ad." And he puts $4M behind the ad buys, even though, by this point, the dark and disgusting context of the ad and condemnations of it by the Republican Governor are blanketing social media and local news stations across Ohio. Here we are, 11 days out, and you gotta figure Mr. Ramaswamy knows his campaign is now on life support and the brain trust that was responsible for this ad in the first place is probably now advising him that he can make it through the next 11 days by just waiting it all out, admitting nothing, apologizing for nothing, withdrawing nothing. Because surely 11 days is more than enough time for this whole thing to cool down -- you know, the whole denying and downplaying of documented child sexual abuse, while the top Republican in your state is publicly begging you to stop acting like a psychopath. It's all a lot to take in.