As a member of Congress, Ron DeSantis voted against providing federal financial assistance to New York and New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy. Now, as governor of Florida, he’s all for delivering federal money to his state.
A little dose of hypocrisy is nothing new in politics. But DeSantis’s rise to political stardom since becoming governor has been characterized by an unusual level of indulgence in free-lunch politics. And his ability to position himself as a culture warrior reflects not just political savvy (though he surely has that) but a set of fortuitous circumstances that has allowed him to mostly avoid the hard parts of governing, such as setting priorities and making tradeoffs.
His little adventure sending a charter plane to Texas to take Venezuelan asylum-seekers to Massachusetts is a case in point. It was clever in terms of raising the salience of an issue that is bad for Democrats. And it was very clever in terms of injecting Ron DeSantis into a story that has nothing to do with him.
