Janelle Irwin Taylor
Ron DeSantis painted a grim picture of Florida’s future if voters don’t put him in the Governor’s mansion this November.
The former North Florida congressman made his pitch to a group of about 150 supporters Thursday at the Italian Club in Ybor City.
The rally featured live music from a Wayne Newton look-alike. DeSantis’s first-grade teacher danced with her husband as onlookers cheered. The crowd chanted the lyrics to Sweet Caroline.
DeSantis, despite the attacks on his progressive Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, knew how to work his crowd.
His speech opened with a story anyone could relate. As the father of two children under the age of two, DeSantis is constantly chasing around a kid, he regaled. His daughter, nearly two years old, likes to brush her teeth. Long story short, his little girl replaced toothpaste with diaper rash ointment. Nothing gets a crowd going like telling them about the time you brushed your teeth with baby butt-paste.
But the topic quickly turned to the partisan divide between an ultraconservative and a progressive.
“[Gillum] wants to have open borders,” DeSantis said to a chorus of boos. “Take Fentinal. A lot of it is manufactured in China. They ship it to South America and it crosses our borders. I don’t want the drugs coming in.”
During his approximately 30-minute speech, DeSantis only spoke about immigration for a couple, but it by far riled up the crowd more than any other topic. DeSantis described a Florida under Gillum as one where illegal immigrants were running amok. He talked about a student-athlete murdered by an undocumented immigrant and a hypothetical child molester Gillum would send back to the streets to terrorize communities.
“When they come out [of jail,] what do you do with them,” DeSantis said. “If I’m Governor, we’re going to give them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and we’re going to get them the hell out of our state.”
DeSantis criticized his opponent for wanting to turn Florida into a sanctuary state where immigration laws are either ignored, unenforced or both.
He also blasted Gillum’s education plan that calls for increasing corporate tax rates from the current 5.5 percent to 7.75 percent in order to raise $1 billion for education.
DeSantis said that tax hike would make Florida a “high-tax state” and drive away economic activity by discouraging businesses to operate in the Sunshine State, which would then cause people in the middle class to lose jobs, leading to a massive economic backslide.
“He has never met a tax he wouldn’t hike,” DeSantis said. “He points to California as what he wants Florida to be. California is one of the highest tax states. The middle class in California, man those policies have come down on them like a ton of bricks.”
“We can’t let that happen here.”
Gillum’s proposed corporate tax increase would fund his public education reform plan that includes raising teacher salaries to at least $50,000 for starting teachers.
DeSantis said his plan is better. Under the DeSantis education plan, 80 percent of all public education funding would be spent in the classroom.
DeSantis also said he would maintain Florida’s expansive school choice programs of which Gillum is critical. Those include tax credit scholarships that give donors a tax break if they contribute to a fund that allows low-income students to attend private school as well as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated.
“These programs have liberated parents and allowed them to make decisions about what’s best for their child,” DeSantis said. “It’s popular, yet Andrew gallium says he’s going to end the program. How is that moving Florida forward?”
Health care also came up. Before the DeSantis event, a small group of counterprotesters led by Democratic Attorney General candidate Sean Shaw drew attention to Gov. Rick Scott and “the Republican agenda” DeSantis is championing that would continue to reject federal funds to expand Medicaid and deny health coverage to nearly 1 million Floridians.
Protesters waved signs saying things like “DeSantis makes me sick” and calling DeSantis “DeSatire.”
The protest was staged across the street from the Italian Club. As DeSantis supporters noticed they began walking over with their own signs and attempting to get in the way by placing their signs in front of their opponents.
The DeSantis crowd began chanting, “we believe Brett,” referring to the ongoing controversy surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s impending confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, which was held up after he was hit with three accusations of sexual assault or misconduct.
Attempt to squash the Kavanaugh confirmation, Democrats repeatedly say “believe women.”
Inside the Italian Club, DeSantis said he would support maintaining the existing Medicare and Medicaid system, arguing that if Democrats managed to implement “Medicare for all,” it would mean people with quality private or employer-sponsored health care plans would be forced into inferior plans.
The Ybor stop was part of an entire day in Tampa planned for the DeSantis campaign, including another event at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital and a private dinner with Pam Bondi and other party leaders.
Polls show a close race between the two candidates, with Gillum having a slight edge.
