Keys Afternoon

By Carrie Jacobson

This is my first real time in Florida, and I’ve noticed some things.

The Atlantic is a different color here than in New England. Here, it varies tremendously, according to the light, the time of day and the weather, at least for starters. Often, it’s an amazing azure blue, like you see in the ads. In the day and a half I’ve been here, I’ve seen it green, turquoise, celadon, and the amazing and indescribable color you see from glacial runoff.

The water is saltier, too – or so it seemed this afternoon, when I dunked myself in. Yes, it’s November 14. So I had to go in!

It’s hard to remember what time of year it is. Everything is green. Flowers are blooming. If I lived here, I would lose track of everything. But in the stores, Christmas items are out, and in Homestead, the downtown Christmas tree was already decorated.

Far as I can tell, there are no Wal-Marts in the Keys.

Key West is like Newport with palm trees and mopeds. I drove in, drove around and drove out, happy to be away. I didn’t see Hemingway’s house.

I have seen at least five people who clearly just live outdoors.

In Sarasota, cows graze in fields across the six-lane street from Lowe’s and Applebee’s – and there are palm trees in the cow fields.

In the bathrooms, women apparently don’t squat above the seats. I have not encountered one wet seat, hallelujah.

People drive really, really fast here. I was in Sarasota for three days and saw four huge accidents. I’ve been in the Keys for a day and a half, and have seen two crashes that resulted in cars turned over on their roofs.

Here's my painting in the landscape

By Jeffrey Page

There’s a fact about the results of this election that baffles me and which I haven’t been able to put aside. According to a story in The Times, exit polls indicated that Mitt Romney won 52 percent of the male vote, faring seven points better than President Obama. So men went for Mitt even with Mitt answering as few questions as possible.

Is there some logic in this? Are men just dumb enough to allow themselves to be hoodwinked by a snake oil salesman who wants to be big boss of earth so badly that he won’t be specific about anything, and whose convictions are about a half-inch thick?

Why would any demographic group – least of all, the second largest in the country and therefore one that can demand answers – come out in large numbers to support a silent candidate? Men argue about everything, about work, politics (usually), sports, movies, their favorite beers, the best pizza place in town, Beatles vs. Stones. Why would they give a candidate a free ride on their futures and the futures of their families and their nation?

Mitt Romney switched on just about everything. Consider the question of abortion. In the years, months and days leading up to the election, I knew that at one time Romney was prochoice. Then, with the emergence of the Tea Party, Romney, with the grace of a metallic pancake, flipped.

Reasonable people will agree that anyone has the right to a change-of-mind. The problem with Romney of course is that he changed his mind on abortion, and other matters, several times.

This is a terrible and dangerous way for candidates to act. It gives voters no information and lets the candidate off the hook when we don’t raise a stink about non-responses. It can’t make Tea Partiers happy. It surely can’t make pro-choice people comfortable.

So blatant were his vacillations that if flip-flopping were an Olympic sport, Romney would have been a medalist. Not only did he vacillate on abortion, sometimes he did it with breathtaking speed. Here’s a story that deserved much more ink than it received:

Bloomberg News reminded readers that Romney’s message in the period leading up to the Republican convention in late August, was that he opposed abortion in most cases. He also blasted Barak Obama, saying the president was way out of line in forcing religious organizations to provide contraception in their employees’ health coverage.

Then, about 40 days later, Romney said: “I think I’ve said time and again, I’m a pro-life candidate. I’ll be a pro-life president. The actions I’ll take immediately are to remove funding for Planned Parenthood. It will not be part of my budget.”

And then, about three weeks after that – just before the election – Bloomberg reported that the Romney campaign ran a TV ad in the three battleground states of Virginia, Florida and Ohio noting that Romney “doesn’t oppose contraception at all” and “thinks abortions should be an option” in certain situations.

To cast an intelligent ballot, we need information. Here’s an example of how Mitt Romney thwarted curious Americans. It’s another story that was not widely reported. Late in the campaign, Romney granted a five-minute interview to a local TV reporter in Colorado, and then proceeded to dictate the rules of engagement.

The reporter had to agree to ask no questions about abortion and no questions about Todd Akin, the genius who believes a woman’s body is somehow designed not to get pregnant as the result of “a legitimate rape.”

All right. This wretchedly long presidential selection process is over for now though there already is talk about Hillary Clinton’s plans for 2016, and we are all relieved of robo calls, endless radio and TV commercials, and tons of campaign material in the mail.

But the question remains: What were the men of America thinking?

By Jeffrey Page

It’s over, thank God. Years after the Republicans decided that Barak Obama would be easy pickings in 2012, it’s over. And after the crowd of GOP candidates grew so thick it looked like the E Train during rush hour, it’s over. Finally it was just Romney, and as Mitt went down to defeat, he took some very annoying people with him.

The major pin to fall of course was Mitt himself. Unless he changes his mind about ending his political career – and remember, he has changed his mind about everything else – we no longer have to listen to his non-answers. (Yes, but which income tax deductions would you end? he was asked again and again, and never said anything of substance.) In doing so, Romney inadvertently proved that a majority of people in the United States will not be bamboozled by a candidate waging a campaign that says nothing, answers nothing, and ultimately is nothing. Romney’s form of a careful, nonspecific campaign for fear of offending someone recalls a line by E.E. Cummings: “A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.”

And a Romney episode that shocked me but seemed to run out of steam fairly quickly was the case of the boy with the bleached hair. Years ago when he was in prep school and before he adopted his Ozzie Nelson persona, Mitt spotted a fellow student on campus with chemically blond hair. With a group of likeminded Neanderthal vigilantes – not even one-on-one – Romney attacked the other boy and cut off his hair. Such an act identifies you for life and maybe you ought not run for president if you were part of the gang because America doesn’t like cowards who attack in packs.

Goodbye Mitt.

By now, it has likely dawned on Nan Hayworth, the one-term backbencher, that you can’t win an election by saying nothing more than your opponent doesn’t live in the district. Nor can you romance the Tea Party while flirting with everyone else at the dance with a hint that you’re really pro choice.

Goodbye Nan.

What should have been apparent to certain national Republicans is that sometimes you actually have to be civil if you hope to accomplish something. The example is Angus King, the former Republican governor of Maine who jumped into this year’s contest as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by the moderate Republican Olympia Snowe.

His move could have been orchestrated by George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany boss of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who once declared (in another context) “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

King took ‘em and won, despite being trashed by the GOP. Now he has a decision to make: Will he caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats? Take a guess.

As noted by Zest writer Jean Webster last week, a man named Joe Walsh ran for a congressional seat in Illinois. His opponent was Tammy Duckworth, a career soldier who reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and who lost her legs in combat in Iraq. It’s hard to run against someone gravely wounded in combat so Walsh declared total war on Duckworth. He said she was not heroic enough and, in one of the ugliest quotes of the year, said: “What else has she done? Female? Wounded veteran? Ehhhhh.”

Duckworth: Elected. Walsh: Back under his rock.

Todd Akin and his “legitimate rapes?” Gone.

Tammy Baldwin, the openly gay candidate for senator from Wisconsin? Elected.

Florida. Admit it. At times Tuesday night, you experienced the sickening feeling that, as in 2000, this election would wind up in the hands of state officials in Florida and that the state Supreme Court would rule one way and the U.S. Supreme Court would rule another way, and that Obama, with a minuscule Florida lead, would be the new Al Gore.

But then came Virginia, Pennsylvania, the fabled Ohio, and suddenly you understood that Romney was going home to Boston, that President Obama was going home to the White House, and that Florida didn’t matter.

By Jeffrey Page

Like most young newspaper reporters who think they know everything, I started out believing that the weather story was a waste of time because in most cases, it would appear on newsstands and front porches about 24 hours after the event and tell readers what they already knew.

But as we have seen this week, the weather is always news. When it’s bad, it destroys homes, disrupts routine. Sometimes it kills people. Thus, good editors assign weather stories carefully, and remind their writers to avoid clichés, to keep “Mother Nature” out of it. Also, when the snow closes the schools, avoid at all costs telling about how lucky the kids are to get a snow day. It’s been done many times before.

Another angle that’s been done to death is a reporter being sent to the local Home Depot store to get those banal, one-sentence comments from people buying a snow shovel, air conditioner, tire chains, maybe a small space heater. Enough of these free ads unless the writer can find someone with a truly unusual story. Maybe the man who survived a flood on the Mississippi is now buying a sump pump, or the pregnant woman who once gave birth in a car during a heat wave and is buying an air conditioner – just to be on the safe side.

I used to write boring weather stories.

Then I got to The Record in Hackensack and worked for some very sharp editors who understood the importance of reporting the weather before and after it struck and insisted on something new, something fresh, something that that would draw the reader in and then offer essential information on surviving. The managing editor who hired me said that if you can make someone stop reading your story for a moment and say, “Oh, right, I didn’t know that,” you’ve saved the day.

At The Record, the idea was to grab the reader’s attention with something she might not have known and assume this would keep her with the story until you got to the important part. The editors insisted on this approach.

So, during a cold snap in New Jersey with 10 inches of snow I called the manager of a hotel in Dawson, Alaska to find out how they deal with snow and cold up there. “You have to move about, see people,” she said. “You have to get out to a movie, maybe take a walk, or do some drinking. People do a lot of drinking in Dawson.” I didn’t know that.

On a blistering day, I was out of ideas and asked an editor for some help. He suggested someone who stays cool. Maybe someone who works in a movie house. Maybe the ice cream man. Maybe someone who sells ice for a living, and I found a man in Garfield sitting on a 300-pound block of ice, sipping from a container of steaming coffee and reading the daily racing form. A nice way to get into a story about the heat. (I saved the ice cream man for another time.)

Once in Hackensack, a reporter was out early talking with people driving to drive to work in a fresh snow. He could have asked, “Traffic pretty slow, eh?” but instead chose to ask with nice incredulity, “What? You didn’t call in sick?” and waited for responses to this journalistic finger pointing.

The weather story is important, but another prosaic top about Jack Frost nipping at your nose could lead readers to skip it. But chances are you’d stay with a story written many years ago by H. Allen Smith of the New York World-Telegram after reading the first paragraph. It went like this:

“Snow, followed by small boys on sleds.”

By Jeffrey Page

The warm and fuzzily named American Family Association sounds like the kind of outfit just about anyone would be happy to join, but it turns out that AFA is, as Tallulah Bankhead once described herself, as pure as the driven slush.

This story begins with the annual observance of the decade-old “Mix It Up at Lunch Day,” the clunky title for a program designed to urge students to accept one another without regard to race, religion, disability or – horror of horrors! – sexual orientation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which originated the Mix It Up at Lunch Day as part of its Teaching Tolerance program, asks schools to encourage students to have lunch for one day – next Tuesday, Oct. 30 – with someone they’ve avoided in the past. There’s no assigning of lunch tables or lunch mates, just kids deciding to sit with someone new for a while, or deciding not to.

Somehow the Sanfordville School in the Warwick district wound up on the law center’s list of participating schools, but the principal, Roger Longfield, told the Times Herald-Record this is not the case. “We’re not participating. We already have our kids mixed up,” he said.

Instead, the Sanfordville School will be decked out in a Halloween motif.

What is the American Family Association and why does it vehemently oppose Mix It Up at Lunch Day?

To call AFA a right-wing outfit is to slander true conservatives. AFA has a lot of weird positions on a lot of issues, but its foremost concern is the bid by gay men and women to be treated as fellow citizens. The Mix It Up at Lunch Day program is, AFA claims, nothing more than part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools.”

Do I exaggerate about the AFA’s benighted worldview? A man called Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association’s director of issue analysis, has written: “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews.” Get it? The holocaust was all Marlene Dietrich’s doing.

It doesn’t stop with gay people.

Fischer’s libel of African-Americans was beyond the pale and will not be repeated here. He lumped all Muslims together as security risks and said that, without exception, they should not be allowed to serve in the military. He said many Indians suffer from poverty and alcoholism because they have refused to adopt Christianity and instead “cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition.” And with no attribution, he declared that “homosexuals are rarely monogamous and have as many as 300 to 1,000 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime.”

In addition to vilifying and slandering the people it doesn’t like, the American Family Association likes to call boycotts.

It boycotted Google because of the search engine’s Legalize Love program on behalf of Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people. AFA called for the avoidance of JC Penney because Penney signed Ellen DeGeneres as its public face. For similar reasons, AFA wants consumers to pass on Levi’s, Cheerios, Pepsi and any number of other products whose manufacturers dare to portray gay people as human beings. At one point Fischer and his friends even wanted us to stop buying Oreos.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that more than 1 million school children participated in Mix It Up last year. Who is going to complain about a white kid and a black kid having sandwiches together? Or a Jew and a Baptist? Or – watch out, here is comes again – a gay kid and a straight kid? Students need to understand that they will not go through life meeting and interacting only with people like themselves.

What America could use are more programs that get people together and fewer that promote hatred and double standards of citizenship.

By Jeffrey Page

There he goes again. Mitt Romney, who never allows the truth to stand in the way of what looks like a lethal blow against an opponent, told a whopper at the Tuesday night debate. But he was caught. And I am left wondering what it is about the protocols of presidential politics that seems to require a debater to say, “Governor, that’s not true” rather than “Governor, that’s a damned lie.”

This time, the issue was Romney’s shameless – and ultimately fact-less – politicization of the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Romney smelled blood in the water. He would nail President Obama for not responding quickly enough to the attack and specifically for failing to label the assault – in which four Americans including the ambassador to Libya were killed – an act of terrorism.

For weeks before the debate, he hinted that Obama somehow had dismissed the incident as the spontaneous actions of demonstrators enraged by the making of the 14-minute movie “The Innocence of Muslims,” which maligns the prophet Mohammed, rather than as a planned act of pure terror.

Now, the fact is that you know the truth about Obama’s behavior after the attack, I know the truth, the president certainly knows the truth, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows the truth, and anybody who was paying attention on Sept. 12 knows the truth. Maybe even Romney knows the truth, or maybe he’ll say anything, do anything, suggest anything – anything at all – to get elected.

It took too long for Obama to conclude this was an act of terror?

As it turns out, President Obama and Secretary Clinton appeared in the White House Rose Garden the day after the attack on the Libyan mission to express their sorrow to the families of the dead, their anger at the killers, their concern for American-Libyan relations, and their resolve to bring the killers to justice.

And there it was. “No acts of terror,” Obama said, “will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Poor Mitt.

At the debate, Romney was flabbergasted when the question of what the president said and when he said it, was raised. “I think [it] interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.”

Obama: “That’s what I said.”

Romney couldn’t believe it: “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror, it was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?”

A moment later, Romney, still confounded, said: “I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”

Obama: “Get the transcript.”

In stepped Candy Crowley, the moderator: “He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take – it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea [of] there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.”

This wasn’t good enough for Romney, or else he didn’t care about the veracity of his criticism of Obama. Or maybe it was Romney’s secret message to the American people in which he revealed his personal pathetic inadequacy. It’s Mitt Romney who has sworn that on his first day in office as president he would label the Chinese as “currency manipulators.” First day leaves little time for discussion and reasonableness.

The first debate revealed a lot about Romney. Tuesday night’s meeting confirmed it. There’s his casual relationship with the facts and the truth. There’s his constant smirk. There’s his contempt for authority, such as his interrupting the moderator to try and set his own rules of engagement. There’s his dismissal of the rules of the game. There’s his continual attempt to get the last word even when the last word is not his to get.

By Jeffrey Page

The presidential debates are long, boring, often off the topic, tedious, and mostly inconsequential – though Mitt Romney’s return from the dead after the first confrontation this year is nothing short of miraculous.

Clearly, we need a new system. Here are some modest proposals.

–The Pants-on-Fire format. Each candidate would be connected to a lie detector. The graphs, needles and other indicators of prevarication would be televised and appear beneath the candidates in their t-shirts. Off stage, a crew of non-partisan fact checkers with high-speed computers would check the candidates’ statements and responses. If the fact checkers need a little extra time, they would get it, and viewers would listen to the Ode to Joy while waiting. When it is determined that a candidate uttered a whopper – such as Romney’s saying there are 23 million people out of work when, bad enough, the official figure is 12.5 million – he would get a whipped cream pie in his face and a Bronx cheer.

–The Shut-Up-Already format. In this, the moderator (more on this role later) would have the authority to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it becomes clear that the would-be president is repeating himself. Redundancy would breed more than contempt; it would result in an otherwise articulate man yammering away in complete silence and looking pretty foolish. One microphone cutoff is the limit; if he bores the nation a second time, a man dressed as Bert Lahr appears and yanks him off the stage with a long wooden cane.

–The Stay-on-Message format. Ever notice how often the moderator asks a question and a candidate answers a different question? Example: The moderator asks, “What is your candid assessment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?” and a candidate, not wishing to get pinned down on that monster of a question, responds, “Well, Jim, I’d just like to say that when I’m in the Oval Office I will continue the tradition of pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey. The Easter Egg Hunt would be safe as well.” When a candidate begins answering a question that hasn’t been asked the moderator would get silence by switching off his audio switch.

–The Trivialize-the-Process-at-Your-Peril format. A siren would blare and red lights would flash if any candidate’s whose first words in the debate amounted to a personal trifle to his wife such as: “And so I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.” No, sir. Not with the nation in recession, at war, worried about health care, concerned about jobs, and angry about the complete inability of the president and Congress to speak the same language.

–The Face Code format. Candidates must give a damn about what they’re doing as they stand there behind the lectern and before the nation. Not only that; they have to look like they give a damn. If they appear bored to tears, they’re off the air. If they look like they you can’t be bothered, they’re off the air. Example A: George H.W. Bush checking his wristwatch as Bill Clinton spoke in a 1992 debate. Example B: Barack Obama doing a great imitation of a bored professor about to nod off in mid-sentence in the lecture hall. You want to be president? Show passion, even when you’re not addressing a friendly crowd.

–The moderator must be taller than the candidates. He must be tougher. He must take no abuse. And he must make use of his audio switch so that when a candidate talks over him he can get immediate silence and restore order on matters of time allotments and staying on subject. Any candidate who abuses or otherwise disrespects the moderator would have to sit in the corner for the rest of the debate and wear a dunce cap with the word “RUDE” in big yellow letters.

–The Or-Else-Settle-it-Out-Back format. No moderator. No audience. Just two seated candidates facing each other and talking about their programs and what’s wrong with the other’s plans. This would make the debates more civil because it’s not easy to suggest that your opponent is an ignorant ass when you’re alone in the room with him and he’s just a few feet away.

In this format, the candidates would agree – on camera, before the nation – to abide by time rules. They would also take a cue from feminist consciousness raising: No interrupting. When one candidate says something that’s wrong or a lie, his opponent jots it down and rebuts on his own time.

I think that in this arrangement, the candidates would be better behaved and stick closer to the truth. Then again, probably not.

By Jeffrey Page

My birthday’s not for another 10 months but this week I received a most thoughtful gift from the government. It was a day with almost no mail. Actually there were two items, a bill from the plumber, which I expected, and a card from the American Symphony Orchestra inviting me to Bard College for a concert that will include a performance of a concerto for tuba. I’m not going.

But this is not about music for tubas.

It’s about the fact that every morning, the letter carrier drops off a packet of mostly sheer trash. I almost always know when he arrives because there is so much mail coming in that I hear a distinctive thump as it’s delivered.

Does this happen to you?

You look through the day’s delivery in the naïve belief that there’s something important in there, something interesting – maybe a letter of acceptance from a magazine, maybe a check, maybe a note from a nephew on the West Coast – but no. Important things rarely arrive. I remember when the mail was fun, when you might get a letter from a friend or a favorite aunt. This hasn’t happened for decades. Nowadays the important stuff is a bank statement; almost all the rest is trash.

Every so often a credit card company with which I have an account wonders how I’m doing, and, in the event I’m not doing well, they include a sheet of six personalized checks. All I have to do is fill one out and sign it, and presto! An instant loan. I think this is a little too casual a way of getting one’s hands on some needed cash.

Do you get those sheets of stickers with your name and address on them? The charitable organizations that send them must believe that using a pen to write my return address on an envelope is just too burdensome. Often they get the names and titles wrong anyway, such as “Mrs. & Mr. Page, Jeffrey” (complete with ampersand and strangely placed comma).

I usually write shopping lists on the backs of used envelopes, but sometimes a charity sends me a little pad marked “shopping list.”

Don’t get me wrong; I give to certain charities. But I’m tired of having to open their pitches all year long when, as I have informed them, I have no intention of donating on their schedule, but on my own. They ignore me, and the pitches keep coming. Sometimes they call to ask me how much I’m kicking in this year, and the caller sounds put-off when I say he’ll find out when I send it.

I get autumn catalogues, winter catalogues, spring catalogues and summer catalogues from high-end stores and usually ignore them and their grand prices. And I get holiday catalogues from any number of museums whose prices are outrageous.

I don’t respond to any of these ads, but the postal trash just keeps piling up. Without exaggeration, I think I receive about a dozen invitations a year to subscribe to Optimum. The one that arrived today – addressed to “Our Neighbor,” which is odd since I’m in Orange County and they’re in Nassau County – says their latest special offer ends on Oct. 15, but I know the come-ons will continue after that. They always do.

Do you get pitched by outfits supporting victims of certain diseases and the scientists trying to put an end to those illnesses? I do. I am contacted by groups advocating for homeless people, sick people, and hungry people. I have empathy for all, but when these letters come day after day, week after week, I spend a lot of time tending to this junk and get weary. I go through the stuff and withdraw anything with my name and address and put it through a paper shredder, whose contents I add to the recycling barrel for later pickup and disposal.

Once, I let a membership in an environmental organization lapse and was bombarded with paper asking me how I could have forgotten to re-join. It took a year or so, but the paper finally stopped coming.

Nan Hayworth is relentless. I think she sends me more mail than she sends her favorite uncle. This morning I received a flyer from something called Friends of Nan Hayworth – they didn’t identify themselves – telling me that her opponent, Sean Patrick Maloney, is a bum.

The next piece of mail was from the very same Sean Patrick Maloney telling me what a great guy he is.

I get new-car ads all the time, and sometimes I get brochures from garages about bargain basement prices for oil-changes.

Maybe I can put a stop to this paper blizzard. This week I called the Direct Marketing Association (212-768-7277) to ask that my name be placed off-limits to direct mailers. I was sent to a website – www.dmachoice.org – and advised to look for a link called “get started.” It takes a while for the mailings to stop.

I’ll let you know how I make out.

By Jeffrey Page

Listen to the words of a man whose income two years ago was $22 million and then tell me he has a scintilla of understanding of what it’s like to be an American of ordinary means.

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have [health] insurance,” Mitt Romney said on his now-famous interview on “60 Minutes.” “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

In fact, Mitt Romney doesn’t know what people do when they have heart attacks. He doesn’t know if people sit in their apartments and die. He doesn’t know if they call 911 and ask for an ambulance. He doesn’t know which side of town gets the better service.

Romney’s misplaced optimism comes at a time when the nation is losing emergency medical services. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported a study last year showing that “From 1990 to 2009, the number of hospital [emergency departments] in nonrural areas declined by 27 percent, with for-profit ownership, location in a competitive market, safety-net status, and low profit margin associated with increased risk of [emergency department] closure.

I don’t think Mitt Romney could possibly be so rosy about treatment in a hospital’s emergency room if in the last two years he had read a report by the American College of Emergency Physicians, which found the average time patients spend in the emergency room is four hours, seven minutes.

Romney doesn’t know this because he doesn’t know anyone who depends on the emergency room for treatment of a broken arm, a raging fever, a dose of Lyme disease.

Many years ago, I was living in Flushing and awoke one Sunday morning at about 2 o’clock with an excruciating toothache. Take it easy; I’m not about to sit here and suggest that my toothache compares in any way with someone’s having a heart attack. And I’m not going to tell you that a toothache is anything like the pain of labor or the pain of a kidney stone.

But it hurt like hell. My wife drove me to Queens General Hospital, about a 15-minute ride from our apartment. An admitting clerk took my name, asked me what the problem was, and told me to take a seat. I remember asking if I could just have a pill for pain while I waited and of course this was out of the question. So I waited.

People staggered in to that emergency room with all kinds illness and injury. So I waited. I absolutely understood and accepted the fact that my emergency paled when compared with some of the others playing out before me. Still I was annoyed that the process had to take this long.

My annoyance subsided about an hour after I registered with the arrival in the ER of a man whose shirt was drenched with blood. The staff went into high gear and they got this man off his stretcher, onto a gurney and whisked him away, presumably to emergency surgery.

I turned to my wife. At this rate, the ER triage might get me some pain medication in a year or so. It was time to go home.

Now, Mitt Romney is saying not to worry if you don’t have health coverage. Just direct your feet to the nearest emergency room.

But back in 2010, when that four-hour ER stay was reported, Dr. Angela Gardner, the then-president of the American College of Emergency Physicians declared: “Hospital emergency departments continue to close, which reduces access to medical care still further. More patients plus fewer ERs equals longer wait times.

“Near one quarter of hospitals report periods of ambulance diversion because they are over capacity,” Gardner continued. “A longer ride to the hospital is not good medicine.”

Responding to Romney, Dr. Debra Houry, the vice chairwoman for research and associate professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told the Huffington Post: I know that not only is it ridiculous to imply that emergency rooms are a replacement for insured health care, but that our already overburdened system can’t even go on much longer as it is – underfunded, overcrowded and little understood.

Remember how Bill Clinton was ridiculed when he said he feels our pain? This week, in Westerville, Ohio, Romney informed an audience: “I’ve been across this country. My heart aches for the people I’ve seen.”

Does anyone believe him?

Jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The most startling aspect of the Romney implosion is the degree of contempt he reserves for half the population of the country he would govern.

In essence, he dismissed 47 percent of Americans as a bunch of moochers standing around on Saturday night with nothing to do but demand a hot time in the old town, courtesy of the United States treasury. In a line that will live as long as Clinton’s search for what the definition “is” is, Romney told a bunch of fat cats at a $50,000 a plate dinner last spring that people of the 47 percent “believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it…. ”

Let’s see. That 47 percent would include older people, poorer people, sick people, wounded veterans, people who’d like better schools for their kids, hungry people, people who sleep in cardboard boxes in winter, farmers, federal employees who could use a raise. The list of carefree people having a happy time seeking government handouts goes on.

If that weren’t enough to ruin a billionaire’s day, this 47 percent paid no federal income tax last year, Romney says. Which, of course, is at worst a deliberate distortion of the truth, or at best sheer ignorance. The New York Times quoted from a report of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center indeed showing that 46.4 percent paid no federal income tax last year, but noted that most of those people were elderly or low income. However, most of those households paid payroll taxes, which fund Medicare and Social Security.

The inescapable irony in Romney’s complaint about poor people and taxes is his continual ducking of the question of how much income tax he himself paid – if he paid any at all – in the years leading up to 2011, when he had an income of $22 million, or $6,000 a day.

Regarding Romney’s upset with people needing help, we Americans are not so cold that we’ll ignore a man going hungry or a woman seeking emergency care for a sick child. This is what Romney calls entitlements. Is a man entitled to a meal? Of course he is. Is someone entitled to get a child seen by a doctor? By their very membership in the U.S. branch of the human race, they are entitled to such help. Do you agree?

And, to again use that word that Romney and his friends so despise, two people raising a child or two on $25,000 a year indeed are entitled to food and housing assistance precisely because this is America where we can and will help those who are struggling.

This is America where we try to get people off the streets when the temperature drops in winter. This is America where sick people get treated.

It’s America, where Romney the candidate said of the 47 percent, “My job is not to worry about those people,” leading any reasonable person to understand that Romney the President would say precisely the same thing.

After the tape of Romney telling his pals about the 47 percent, he found his face covered with a half dozen eggs and called a 10 p.m. news conference this week – he rarely speaks directly with reporters – to inform any and all that he wants it both ways.

–1. He stands by his dismissal of half the country.

–2. But his comments were “not elegantly stated.”

–3. Although he had been speaking off the cuff.

–4. In any case, he wishes “to help all Americans – all Americans – have a bright, prosperous future.”

–5. That’s all Americans in case you missed it.

Question: Does any member of the 47 percent believe him?

Question: Does any member of the 53 percent believe him?

Romney fails to understand the Declaration of Independence’s noting that “all men” – not just the ones whose daddies ran a big car company – are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he doesn’t get it, that “life” is not merely the opposite of death but an ongoing qualitative term. No one enlisted in the Continental Army to fight for life the way it used to be.

Romney further fails to understand that in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, and promote the general welfare, as the Constitution claims as its raison d’etre, a nation and its leaders must be ready to stand with the poorest as well as the richest.

America gets it. Would-be President Romney does not and as a result, ought to do the country a favor and step aside. He’s not qualified for the office.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com