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In 1978, Ohio police arrested a man named Cledith Arthur for raping his stepdaughter, then 12. On the basis of the evidence of Arthur’s guilt presented to it, a grand jury indicted him. Facing trial, Arthur fled the jurisdiction and spent the rest of his life as a fugitive, ducking arrest warrants.
The little girl’s mother turned on her. The last time that little girl spoke to her mother was at the courthouse, 48 years ago. “I went to give her a kiss,” recalls that little girl, now the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, Dr. Amy Acton, “and she just turned her cheek away. That was the last time I ever saw her.”
Dr. Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, vividly remembers the abuse he and his sister were subjected to. “I received a lot of abuse,” Stearns recalls. “But Amy got the worst of it.” That abuse was sufficiently serious that the authorities removed the children from their mother’s custody, a removal mandated by the need to protect them from her.
Amy Acton has lived a remarkable life, the more so given what she has endured: rape, physical and emotional deprivation and then abandonment by a mother who turned her back on her in favor of her daughter’s rapist. Acton worked her way through college, earned a medical degree, completed residencies in pediatrics and preventive medicine, earned a master’s degree in public health, and became a leader in her field. She was so highly credentialed that, even though she is a Democrat, a Republican governor of Ohio appointed her as his director of public health, a cabinet-level position. The Dayton Daily News called her “Ohio’s trusted face during the pandemic.” And she was so well regarded that she was unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio this year, no insignificant feat in and of itself.
With polls over the past several months showing Dr. Acton pulling ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy, her fast-talking, uber-self-confident billionaire Republican opponent, Ramaswamy did last week what even other entirely amoral politicians might have declined to do out of a molecule or two of residual decency. He unearthed Dr. Acton’s mother, who had ditched her daughter almost a half century ago in favor of her fugitive, indicted husband, to film a campaign ad calling her daughter “a liar.”
With the stepfather deceased, the only wretch that Ramaswamy had available to him to conjure up an attack on Acton was the mother, the perfect embodiment of shamefulness and as patently non-credible as they come to boot. It was a move that seemed to many Americans to capture all-too-neatly the nadir to which American civic life has plummeted.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” ruminated former President Barack Obama in Cleveland last week, “where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that someone can run an ad like that.” What’s happened is that Americans have let it happen and, even worse, in too many cases, have embraced and even applauded it.
To nobody’s surprise, our Bottom Feeder-in-Chief praised Ramaswamy’s ad, endorsing the obviously unsound mother as “very lucid,” encouraging Ramaswamy to “ride with it.” Vice President J.D. Vance was no less a fan of the cruelty of hauling out someone’s own mother, who backed a rapist against her own daughter, to mouth trash about her. Critics of the ad, Vance spat contemptuously, should “stop whining” about it, saying that the ad “calls it out like it is and calls (Acton) a liar.”
In their introduction to “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump,” authors Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark rue “the rough edges of (America’s) raucous democracy,” the “highly partisan political culture” and “the descent into political folly” which our country is experiencing. But that doesn’t adequately describe where we are if conduct like Ramaswamy’s, modeled, urged on and validated by the likes of Trump and Vance, carries the day. There’s been a descent, all right, but not merely into political folly. It’s a lot deeper and a lot uglier than that.