There is a simple test for whether an attack on a candidate is legitimate: does it tell voters something about how she would govern? By that standard, Vivek Ramaswamy's new ad fails, and the failure is not subtle.
The ad puts Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's estranged mother, on camera to say Acton is untruthful about her past. Acton and her brother, Philip Stearns, say they were removed from their mother's custody at 12 because of abuse and neglect. Ramaswamy's answer is that his campaign made the ad and that Arthur wasn't paid. That is supposed to settle something. It settles nothing. A man who didn't pay for a weapon is still holding it.
Consider what the ad actually does. It takes the person who, by the account of her own children, hurt them, and hands her a microphone and a campaign logo. She gets to relitigate a childhood in front of the electorate of the fourth-largest swing state in the Midwest. And she does it for a candidate who says he wants to talk about records.
The defense will be that Acton made her story part of her campaign. She did. That is how candidates introduce themselves, and a biography is fair to scrutinize. If a candidate invented a résumé, claimed a degree she never earned, or misstated her record in office, then opposition research is the job. But telling voters 'I survived a hard childhood and was raised through hardship' is not an invitation for the person at the center of that hardship to come back and rebut it. Survivors of abuse know that being believed is the hardest part. Ramaswamy's campaign is telling every one of them what happens when you say it publicly: the one who harmed you gets a campaign spot.
Notice, too, what the ad does not claim. As reported, nothing in it bears on health policy, budgets, schools, property taxes or anything a governor would touch. It is a family dispute, filmed and cut by professionals for an audience of voters. The distinction between 'she was dishonest' and 'her mother says she was dishonest' is carrying a great deal of weight here, and the campaign knows it.
Ramaswamy's team says it is also about Acton's record as the state's health director during the pandemic, and about her supposedly ducking debates. Fine. That record is public and it is fair game. Acton should be made to defend every order and every decision she made under Mike DeWine, and she should show up and do it. But a campaign confident in its case on COVID does not need Acton's mother. Reaching for her suggests the case on the merits wasn't enough.
This is also a party that has spent decades claiming to defend the family. It is a hard claim to square with an ad built to turn a family's worst chapter into a weapon, and with the notion that a mother's word should outrank a child's account of her own childhood and a court's decision to remove her. Honoring family ties doesn't mean every parent is owed a platform. Sometimes the state removes children because the parent was the danger.
Democrats should not let this turn into a pure sympathy play, though. Acton's refusal to accept the attacks is right, but the race will be decided on whether Ohioans trust her to run the state, not on who suffered more. The best response is to make Ramaswamy own the ad: Why did you make it? What did you hope voters would learn? What does it say about how you would use power over people who cross you?
A campaign reveals character in the choices it makes when winning gets harder. This was Ramaswamy's.
