Senator Oz would fight Pennsylvania 'elites' from his oceanfront Palm Beach mansion | Frank Cerabino

I feel I need to clear up something about one of our Palm Beach residents who has been in the news lately.

He goes by the name of “Dr. Oz.” His actual name is Mehmet Oz, and he’s a TV medical celebrity like “Dr. Phil” – except that Dr. Phil is a doctor in the same way that Julius Erving is.

Dr. Oz has made his bones on daytime TV pushing homeopathy, diet supplements, crash diets and what critics have characterized as pseudoscience or medical quackery.

It turns out the green coffee bean extract pills he promoted were not a miracle weight-loss discovery after all. Oh, well.

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Dr. Oz wages war against 'elites'

These days, Dr. Oz is more focused on a political, rather than medical, breakthroughs.

He voted in the presidential election in Turkey in 2018, and not in the U.S. Senate primary in Pennsylvania that year. But for some reason, he now wants to be a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania instead of a Turkish millet meclisi uyesi.

He’s running in Tuesday’s Republican primary election to fill the seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey. And Oz is ahead in some polls.

Go figure. To make matters more complicated, Oz apparently lives in another state (New Jersey), not at his in-laws address in Philadelphia or in the stately oceanfront mansion he owns in Palm Beach.

I’m going to just focus on that last part: the oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, which I believe may require some political triage.

Because as Oz has campaigned for the Senate seat, he has portrayed himself as a regular guy waging war against “the elites.”

Oz likes to use the word “elites” to describe the problematic Americans he’s hoping to thwart.

“It’s time to return the power to the people,” he Tweeted this week. “Liberal elites think the working class of PA can’t think for themselves. We know better.”

On another occasion, he blamed “elite thinkers” for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside,” Oz wrote.

It’s not uncommon for office seekers to single out the all-purpose “elites” – whomever they may be – as the enemy.

But I never knew that having a yard made you an elite, or that Oz would be the one to point to this apparent identifier of elitism.

Because it turns out that Oz has one of the most elite yards in America.

Palm Beach 'yard' includes private beachfront

It’s the one that unfolds from the 11-bedroom, 12,483 square-foot-mansion on Palm Beach he bought seven years ago for $18 million.

The yard there is about 150 wide, which is a pretty elite size for a yard, and it opens to a private beachfront on the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s a private stairway that connects the seawall at the end of the yard to the surf.

I don’t think I’m taking a giant leap of judgment to conclude that Oz has an elite yard fronting an elite body of water.

I mean, it’s not like his yard is facing the C-51 canal, with its occasional blue-green algae runoff from Lake Okeechobee.

His yard is a private entrance to the Atlantic Ocean, the only ocean we have on the East Coast.

Even Mar-a-Lago is across the street from the ocean. You have to go across (or under) Ocean Boulevard to get to the beach from the main house at Mar-a-Lago.

Oz is on the beach. Eeee-leet.

It’s a 1.5-acre piece of property with a historic home designed by Addison Mizner in 1919.

And the next-door neighbor’s property was for a time owned by Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian fertilizer oligarch.

If you’re bumping yards with an oligarch, you’re a long way from the factory workers of Allentown or coal miners of Lackawanna County.

Also, the house has a name. This is a real Palm Beach thing, not necessarily something that’s big in Altoona or Scranton.

Elite homes are named, as if they were yachts or corgis. The home Oz owns in Palm Beach is named “Louwana” and harkens back to the days when it was built for Gurnee Munn, a businessman married to Marie Louise Wanamaker, part of the family that founded the department store chain.

After buying the Palm Beach estate, Oz made it available for $90,000-per-month rentals – which is more than double the average annual income of a family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So I’m thinking that in making the case that he’s the champion of the common man against “the elites,” Dr. Oz needs to quit mentioning that they have yards.

Even if it’s just a faraway yard attached to a spare mansion gathering dust in Palm Beach.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at the Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Dr. Oz would fight 'elites' from Palm Beach mansion as PA senator