Even in this highly partisan era, there are still a few things that will force those in public office to work across the political aisle.
One of those is a natural disaster.
Case in point is the suddenly cooperative tone that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has adopted toward President Joe Biden.
DeSantis, a Republican believed to possess presidential ambitions, has spent most of Biden’s first two years in the White House demeaning the Democrat. A few weeks before Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida, DeSantis tried to underscore criticism of Biden’s immigration policies by flying Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
But now DeSantis needs Biden’s cooperation in getting tens of billions of dollars from Washington to help Florida recover and rebuild.
It’s reminiscent of how chummy Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour got with President Barack Obama after the Democrat’s election in 2008, when Mississippi was needing lots of federal dollars to continue its recovery from the massive damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted in 2005 as well as clean up following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
Biden can’t politically afford to be churlish either. The humanitarian rationale for helping hurricane victims not withstanding, Florida is a key state in any presidential race. The incumbent Democrat lost Florida to Donald Trump in 2020, but it’s still one of the more toss-up states in the South. If Biden hopes to win reelection, or even if he hands the torch to another Democrat to run, he can’t afford to just write Florida off.
