2023-05-15 07:02:32
The clumsiness of our president seems to have no limits. In a bad political moment, Andrés Manuel López Obrador attacked the governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, for his anti-immigrant policies. He must have remembered the big mouth, small tail axiom. If he meddles in the electoral process in the United States calling on Mexicans not to vote for a certain candidate, then he should not demand that from there they ask not to vote for his Dolphin Claudia Sheinbaum, or whoever is designated as her successor, or by candidates who are said to be linked to drug trafficking. Now, to launch once morest De Santis in the days when he prepared the start of his presidential candidacy? As López Obrador says, De Santis scratched himself with him.
López Obrador criticized De Santis when attention was focused on the border with the United States due to the end of Title 42 and the beginning of Title 8, and the villain was the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. De Santis had begun last week with a censure of President Joe Biden for his immigration policy, practically launching his presidential candidacy and preparing the engines to travel to Iowa, where the electoral process begins every four years, and although his weight in votes is minimal , its political significance is enormous. A good start in Iowa shows potential in whoever wins and endorsements start to fall across the country and coffers fill up for the season.
De Santis was in that state and received far more support than Ted Cruz did in 2016. The Florida governor won the support of more than a dozen legislators, including all the leaders of the local Senate and Congress, surpassing the former president in endorsements Donald Trump, who claimed to have 11 legislators and local leaders and activists in his pocket, who was going to endorse this Saturday in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa, but with his bad fortune, and good for De Santis, who due to the bad conditions weather conditions, he canceled the trip.
Iowa was a stage only for De Santis, and López Obrador gave him ammunition for his speeches. Last Tuesday the president said that the immigration policy of Florida and Texas was “immoral.” And at a press conference in Fort Myers, Florida, the governor responded: “We have this president who is criticizing Florida for passing laws once morest illegal immigration. It seems to me that he has a disaster on his hands. The country is completely out of his control, it is being ruled by drug cartels, and all the millions of people who come to our country are passing through his. What kind of country allows millions of people to pass through like this?
López Obrador no longer responded to him, but put his gloves on once morest Louisiana Senator John Neely Kennedy – with no relation to the Kennedy family’s liberal Boston dynasty – following saying something racistly stupid: “Mexico would be eating food from cat out of a can and living in a tent” without the United States. The senator, who as a politician has a solid past, has the rank of junior senator, and he reached that chamber only in 2017. He was re-elected last year with 62% of the vote and is one of five senators who challenged the electoral results in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, which gave Biden victory. Paradoxically, López Obrador and Kennedy are on the same ideological side, unconditionally supporting Trump. López Obrador should never have fought with him, nor Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, much less, because he has to deal with him on a daily basis, the ambassador in Washington, Esteban Moctezuma. A legislator from Morena would have been enough.
But just as all the charge was once morest a legislator with relative weight – in the same last week the Democrats crushed his criminal attempts regarding the fentanyl crisis – with De Santis they took a step back, at least until Sunday. The governor of Florida did the opposite; he quickened his pace with the face of López Obrador in his electoral piñata. On Saturday he was in Sioux City, Iowa, where he told a rally that the border was a disaster.
“When someone who crosses the border has to be stopped and sent across the border, we don’t give them a piece of paper and tell them to come back in four years. What kind of deterrence is this?” the governor charged. “The Mexican cartels are killing a lot of Americans. They must be treated like the hostile force that they are. We need to hold them accountable and we need to hold the Mexican government accountable, because it is allowing this to happen.”
López Obrador got into an unnecessary war of words with De Santis and Kennedy, because what he said stayed here for the stands, and there he heated the issue for the electoral campaign. De Santis is not Trump, in ideological terms. He is worse. He has an aggressive conservative agenda in Florida, fueled by the prosecutors he has appointed, the control he has of councils in critical sectors, education and health, to push his policies, and his dominance over Congress, where he has shaped the State Constitution for its purposes. For now, the only national campaign issues are immigration, López Obrador, the drug cartels and fentanyl.
De Santis still trails Trump in the electoral preferences, partly due to a tactical error, say his critics, and a wait to mature his candidacy, say his loyalists, having hesitated to launch his candidacy at the beginning of the year, which created a vacuum that Trump filled. Today he is on the starting line to go for the White House next year, taking up what Trump said regarding Mexico, López Obrador and the drug cartels. Nothing new in the speeches, but now everything is hurting López Obrador, who by responding wrongly shows weakness and the flank from which he can be attacked.
twitter: @rivapa
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