Newsom has continuously attacked DeSantis for his policies in Florida – even releasing an ad earlier this year urged Americans not to vote for the governor with the tagline ‘don’t make America Florida.’
DeSantis’ team is using that same rhetoric in return, releasing an email with the one-minute video with the subject line: ‘Don’t California Our Nation.’
‘We’re here in the once great city of San Francisco,’ DeSantis said in a straight-to-camera video shot on the streets of the California city.
‘We came in here and saw people defecating on the street. We saw people using heroin. We saw people smoking crack cocaine,’ he detailed. ‘And you look around and the city is not vibrant anymore. It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies. And these policies have caused people to flee this area.’
Newsom claims that DeSantis’ policies are too far right, but DeSantis says on the flip side that his California counterpart’s laws have led to a collapse of the Golden State.
‘They don’t prosecute criminals like they do in most parts of the country and the wreckage has really been sad to see,’ DeSantis said in the video. ‘I’ve seen so many businesses boarded up. I’ve seen so much riff-raff just running around. It just shows you these policies matter. Leadership matters.’
‘They are doing it wrong here,’ he added.
Related: DeSantis diagnoses San Francisco’s problems but the Mayor hates the medicine.
Recently, California politicians have been obsessed with engaging in political sparring matches with Ron DeSantis. Ostensibly, they are angry Californians are leaving their state en masse and moving to Florida. San Francisco Mayor Breed was clearly upset DeSantis pointed out the drugs and feces in the streets, and shot back with her own retort.
INSANITY: San Francisco Mayor @LondonBreed responds to @RonDeSantis by saying people pooping and using drugs in her city's streets is just a "snapshot" of the situation.
She says she needs "solutions" like talking about climate change and AI.
No wonder her city is a sewer! pic.twitter.com/4laGxplTME
— Never Back Down (@NvrBackDown24) June 21, 2023
Breed’s response is a textbook definition of what Victor Davis Hanson once dubbed “The Bloomberg Syndrome.” As VDH wrote in early 2011 when then-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg failed to adequately remove a foot and half or so of global warming from his city streets:
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
And quite possibly, a fair amount of “bad luck” to strike as well.
by Ed Driscoll