Ron DeSantis’ State of the State doubles as 2024 campaign speech

DeSantis laid out priorities at start of Session. Now Floridians share theirs. Image via Colin Hackley.

Ron DeSantis will be back on the campaign trail in Iowa Tuesday night, but even official pronouncements in the state seem to have relevance to that presidential campaign quest.

That includes the State of the State speech. The regular statement of priorities for the 2024 Legislative Session was necessarily backdropped by the looming question of whether the Florida Governor has a path in the presidential race, and if he doesn’t, when does he come back to Tallahassee to get back to business in the state he described poetically as “the heirs to the spirit of 1776 represented by the Liberty Bell.”

DeSantis began his speech with remarks just as relevant to his increasingly quixotic race against Joe Biden as to the 60-day Legislative Session, with the first two minutes offering a familiar compare-and-contrast between this “refuge of freedom and sanity” that is Florida and states under Democratic governance experiencing “failures” made by “elected officials” who “put ideology over sound policy.”

“We are as a country in the midst of a great upheaval and we see this throughout the land,” said DeSantis, who went on to discuss record homelessness, saying “62% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.”

He also touched on fentanyl and “illegal aliens,” the “doom loop” currently afflicting the city of San Francisco, “soft on crime” policies that have impacted Chicago and “failures” that are driving the “great migration” to the state.

In contrast, DeSantis said Florida’s choices have “produced results that are second to none in the country.”

The Governor also discussed foreign policy, specifically Israel in the wake of “one of the worst terrorist attacks in modern history.” DeSantis described Florida-organized “evacuation flights” that he dispatched to the country in the wake of the Oct. 7 onslaught from Hamas, and the Special Session that saw the imposition of sanctions on the “Islamic Republic of Iran.”

He focused on anti-Israel protests at universities “outside of Florida,” saying Florida would expedite acceptance of students transferring from out of state to escape “antisemitism” by “waiving minimum credit hour requirements for transfers, waiving application deadlines for transfers and encouraging universities and colleges to use their existing statutory authority to provide in-state tuition for students with a financial hardship.”

“This week, Jewish students across the country are returning to campuses that have outright Condoned antisemitism,” DeSantis said. “Over the coming months, they’ll have a tough decision to make. Do they pack up and leave or do they stay and continuing, and continue to endure a hostile environment? If they do decide to come to Florida, we will welcome them with open arms.”

“The pro-Hamas activities and rampant antisemitism on college campuses exposed the intellectual rot that has developed on so many college campuses,” DeSantis added. “In Florida, our universities must be dedicated to the pursuit of truth, the promotion of academic rigor and integrity, and the preparation of students to be citizens of our republic.”

The Governor has been talking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in early voting states in recent months, and in Tuesday’s speech, he offered a reminder for his in-state audience.

“DEI is a highly-ideological agenda — in practice it stands for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination — and it has no place in our public universities,” DeSantis said.

The Governor also contrasted the federal debt with the state’s, eliding the budget boost delivered from Washington with pandemic spending the Governor spent on other things he wanted to provide a deceptively linear contrast.

“The recklessness of spending, borrowing and printing of money over the past four years by the federal government has driven up the costs of everything from groceries to housing — and has saddled Americans with high interest rates. The national debt now stands at $34 trillion dollars. In New York City, there is a famous debt clock that shows the national debt going up in real time. I’d like to see one of those made for Florida’s debt — only a Florida debt clock would be counting down, not up, because we have paid down nearly 25% of our state’s debt over the past five years.”

DeSantis doubled back to fentanyl, spotlighting a mother of an overdose victim in the audience, and saying his administration would not “sit idly by while Biden’s border crisis ruins lives across the nation.”

He’d go on to discuss Hurricane Idalia and the state’s response last year, but did not credit Biden with the response, focusing instead on state deployment of resources