Now his own state needs cash, DeSantis is singing a different tune

Days after Hurricane Ian hit south Florida, Ron DeSantis is making the news all over again. Yes, that’s the same Ron DeSantis who sent planeloads of migrants to blue states and cities a couple of weeks ago, in a coordinated stunt with Texas governor Greg Abbott. Yes, that’s the same Ron DeSantis who kept Florida lockdown-free while its ageing population died of Covid. And yes, that’s the same Ron DeSantis who voted against federal funds being used for hurricane recovery efforts in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy hit the Democratic state in 2012.

Now that his own state needs the cash, however, DeSantis is singing a different tune. And Joe Biden has been pretty magnanimous about all of that, promising to support the governor and his state financially and planning a visit to Florida later this week. DeSantis is now of the opinion that the federal government should pick up 100 per cent of the bill for hurricane relief efforts, some of which have been complicated by the fact that evacuation orders were delayed for a lot of severely hit areas. In 2013, he expressed sympathy for Sandy’s victims but said that the government couldn’t afford to pay out a large amount of aid.

Some may find it galling that DeSantis is so desperate for federal funds when he used state funds to send migrants around the country in an apparent effort to bolster his name in the press. But most Democrats realise that giving Florida the aid it needs is the right thing to do. Letting the people of Florida suffer needlessly because they voted Republican isn’t the Biden way. Unlike when Trump got in a spat with Andrew Cuomo in 2020 and subsequently threatened not to send Covid vaccines to New York, Biden doesn’t tend to use humanitarian crises for political point-scoring.

The obvious comparisons between the actions of DeSantis now and then have been made in the media (the same for Marco Rubio, also of Florida, who wants all the support his state can get now but only voted for a slimmed-down package of aid after Sandy in 2012). Biden doesn’t need to bring them up. And elsewhere in Florida, the criticisms are rife anyway – for different reasons. Many have accused DeSantis of botching evacuation orders, of telling people to leave their homes far too late for it to be feasible, and for holding back when he should have been more bullish about recommending people get out of the line of impact of the category 4 hurricane.

For sure, DeSantis’s libertarian bent and general distaste of nanny state tactics may have made him hesitate. But it’s also true that the hurricane took an unpredictable path, deviating from cities it was expected to decimate – like Tampa – and then hitting other towns very hard. Hurricanes and tropical storms are by their nature unpredictable, and the governor can’t be held responsible for that.

It’s also true that DeSantis is not exactly a hurricane expert; rather, he’s simply a man who was given too much power. America is fond of putting its politicians in control of all sorts of things that might be better outsourced to experts or dedicated agencies. In the age of “we’re sick of experts” – and in a state famous for the nihilistic Florida Man, subject of so many bizarre media reports – that was never going to fly. So DeSantis was left on his own to coordinate a response he clearly wasn’t equipped for, and now he’s taking the flak.

He’s used to taking responsibility for things he has no real business taking responsibility for (see: his response to Covid in early 2020 when he claimed that his it’s-just-the-flu response to the pandemic had worked because fewer people were dying in Florida than in New York. It turned out that the disease simply hadn’t travelled far enough down the country yet – and once it did, a few months later, Floridians were infected in disproportionate numbers). But taking responsibility for something that is partly his fault and partly an act of God? That one’s going to be a trickier line for the loudmouthed governor to walk. As Florida tallies up its injured and dead and takes stock of its newly homeless, those criticisms are only going to get louder, too. Some of them might even mention – whisper it – the biggest Republican bugbear out there: climate change.