RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amid all the shambles, disorganization, delays, and waste seen any time the federal or many state governments gets involved in something, we have Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis to demonstrate what competent leadership looks like.

He’s like a breath of fresh air.

According to TIPP Insights which had an excellent rundown of all the competent things DeSantis actually did — providing fuel, restoring electric power, setting up shelters, and actually yanking open a closed landfill through a wise use of eminent domain so that hurricane debris could be dumped there to clear the roads for first responders:

DeSantis’s 15-minute address was a masterclass on what the government could and should do. Even the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a bitter critic of all governments, would have been impressed [though he would likely have been upset to know that the storm’s name coincided with his].

DeSantis was a picture of quiet efficiency, a master conductor of a disparate orchestra with hundreds of thousands of players. He starkly contrasted with Vice President Kamala Harris, who tried to show leadership on a Zoom call with senior federal officials also preparing for Hurricane Milton.

 

During the recent hurricane emergencies, DeSantis got immediately involved in protecting the state, having already been prepared for it, and then in help during the storm and after the storm. It’s a big job, given the double natural disasters he’s been dealing with.

But he got to it, and even delivered extra help to other states that didn’t prepare as well as he did, such as North Carolina, delivering massive amounts of temporary bridging so that rescuers could deal with washed away roads and bridges, rescuing the injured, delivering supplies, and getting others out of those areas.

He reportedly threatened to arrest FEMA officials who interfered with the delivery of any aid, an executive order every governor should be making.

Most impressive of all, he didn’t play political games.

He stayed away from cameras and grandstanding generally other than to make announcements to Floridians and quietly did what need to be done. He worked with Joe Biden and FEMA to get Florida the maximum possible help for its recovery — hurricane-ravaged Florida was not only was pounded by Hurricane Helene in its north, but by Milton across its central peninsula — and we all know what he must have thought of them otherwise, but he worked with them anyway, ignoring that entire political atmosphere as there wasn’t time for it. Biden actually praised DeSantis for being so easy to work with.

DeSantis also damningly rebuffed those who did want to play politics, namely, Kamala Harris.

According to Ingrid Jacques, writing in USA Today:

ABC News reported this week that DeSantis had allegedly opted not to take calls from Harris after Hurricane Helene.

This was Harris’ response Monday when she was asked about it: “Moments of crisis, if nothing else, should really be the moment that anyone who calls themselves a leader says they’re going to put politics aside and put the people first. People are in desperate need of support right now and playing political games with this moment in these crisis situations, these are the height of emergency situations, it’s just utterly irresponsible and it is selfish.”

Did I just read that right? She called him ‘selfish’?

Like, ‘in it for himself,’ as her campaign ads bleat against President Trump? She couldn’t come up with anything more original that? She was taking a page from her playbook against President Trump, who was out delivering aid and organizing fundraisers and getting help with Starlink amid the political campaign and now she was throwing it at ubercompetent Gov. DeSantis at a time when he was shining as a state leader — getting most of Florida back on its feet with electricity and water in a matter of days?

As for Trump being ‘selfish,’ well, that aged like milk left out on the sidewalk in Brentwood — as Kamala was throwing out the ‘selfish’ epithet, Trump had just got done offering free hotel rooms for electricity-restoring linemen in Florida, and his own home at Mar-a-Lago, free of charge, to hurricane refugees.

Selfish? This woman makes me nauseous.

And then she was xeroxing the claim and trying to pin it on DeSantis, too, this nasty woman with 92% staff turnover and a husband who was known as ‘the office a******.’

Speaking of selfish …

What, exactly, has she done for this hurricane, other than try to waste Gov. DeSantis’s time in the midst of a double-disaster with politically oriented phone calls to him for the upcoming television ads?

DeSantis was having none of it and smacked her down hard:

All she needed to say was that she’s ready and willing to help in any way she can.

And Harris couldn’t do that.

In response to Harris’ attack, the governor went on Fox News and said the vice president “has no role in this” and hasn’t bothered to reach out during prior hurricanes.

“In fact, she’s been vice president for three and a half years,” DeSantis said. “I’ve dealt with a number of storms under this administration. She has never contributed anything to any of these efforts.”

He also said he’s dealt with storms under both former President Donald Trump and Biden and has worked fine with both of them.

“She’s the first one who’s trying to politicize the storm, and she’s doing that just because of her campaign,” DeSantis said. “I don’t have time for political games.”

DeSantis denies even knowing she had called. Rather, he has spoken with President Joe Biden as well as the head of FEMA, the federal agency tasked with handling such emergencies.

That’s one of the most deadly smackdowns I’ve ever read. It’s pure fire.

That should finish off Harris’s wretched campaign and loathesome political career, though we know it won’t.

But it does highlight that Ron DeSantis is doing an amazing job, rescuing Florida from the ravages of two hurricanes it was on the sharp end of all at once, and restoring Florida swiftly to normalcy amid disaster that would wreck less competent states with less capable leadership. Voters remember performances like these, the acts of those who do as opposed to those who talk about it, and the acts of those who get results. DeSantis is the man all voters want in a storm. In the midst of all this, he’s quietly filing capital into his political savings bank because voters long for competence like this and when DeSantis’s time comes to be president, he’s going to be impressive.