Mehmet Oz blamed his Wegmans name mix-up on exhaustion from campaigning — which he said has also led to slip-ups in his personal life.
“I was exhausted,” Oz told Newsmax anchor Shaun Kraisman, noting that he was campaigning 18 hours a day. “Listen, I’ve gotten my kids’ names wrong as well.”
Oz, who will face off against Democrat John Fetterman for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat in November, recently came under fire after filming a video saying he was at “Wegner’s,” confusing the names of grocery stores Wegmans and Redner’s.
In response, Oz defended his mistake, noting that the slip-up is not “a measure of someone’s ability to lead the commonwealth.”
Fetterman — who has a knack for ridiculing Oz — slammed his opponent for being pretentious as Oz shopped for vegetables for “crudité” for his wife in the video, gathering broccoli, asparagus, carrots, guacamole and salsa.
“Guys, that’s $20 for crudité and this doesn’t include the tequila,” Oz said in the video, “I mean, that’s outrageous, and we got Joe Biden to thank for this.”
“In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” Fetterman tweeted, further questioning Pennsylvania Oz’s candidacy over a month after Oz filmed campaign ad in his New Jersey mansion. In May, Stephen Colbert also questioned Oz’s residency, joking that “despite the fact that until the moment he announced, [Oz had] been living in and filming his show in New Jersey.”
Kraisman addressed Fetterman’s remarks and asked, “Is Dr. Oz relatable to the everyday, hard-working American there in Pennsylvania?”
“I rolled my sleeves up my whole life,” Oz responded “I’ve taken care of patients, saved lives, invented devices, I’ve started foundations where we take care of tens of thousands of teens around the country trying to help wherever I can. That’s what my life’s been about.”
“When I joke about a crudité, which is a way of speaking about how ridiculous it is that you can’t even put vegetables on a plate in the middle of a campaign,” he continued, “We’ll do whatever we need to do to make sure the people of Pennsylvania respect what we’re about and that we’re going to work as hard as we can to fix their problems.”
He concluded by challenging his Democratic opponent: “What have you done, rolling your sleeves up in your own life to make life better for the people of Pennsylvania?”