After weeks of will-they-won't-they, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania agreed to a televised debate against Republican rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz. They feuded over terms in what has become a flashpoint in the high-stakes campaign.
Fetterman’s campaign has said Oz was operating in bad faith by insisting on so many debates and said Oz’s motivation is to mock Fetterman for having a stroke. Fetterman still speaks haltingly and struggles to quickly respond to words he hears.
To accommodate that, Fetterman asked the station for closed-captioning during the debate and two practice sessions in the studio ahead of time.It wants a moderator to tell the audience that Fetterman is using closed captioning to explain delays in his responses; practice sessions to not use actual debate questions; and the debate to be 90 minutes, instead of 60, because of closed-captioning delays.
Fetterman’s campaign said it had no problem with telling the audience about the closed captioning and said the practice sessions are simply walkthroughs that are routine before any debate. But Fetterman’s campaign insisted that the debate be 60 minutes and said Oz’s campaign had already agreed.“For weeks Oz and his team have wet the bed about debates,” Fetterman’s campaign said.
In Pennsylvania’s last four U.S. Senate contests, debates have not been a major feature. All the debates took place in mid- to late October, with two debates in each race — except for the 2012 contest, which had one debate. Fetterman has been recovering and was off the campaign trail for most of the summer following his May 13 stroke, which required surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator and prompted a revelation that he had a serious heart condition. Fetterman has provided no access to his doctors or health records and has said he almost died.He has done just a handful of media interviews and no press conferences since the stroke and has used closed-captioning in video interviews with reporters.
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