You could easily say that likely one-day presidential candidate Gov. Gavin Newsom “started it” — if you like schoolyard fight metaphors.
Newsom recently went on a Southern-state swing to American jurisdictions unlikely to be in his corner during any White House bid to tout his California as the true redoubt of freedom on a rather poorly reviewed junket.
But you could also point to much earlier inter-state pointless politicking, such as when former Texas Gov. Rick Perry used to swagger into the Golden State to lobby our businesses to come to the Lone Star State on trips that had more to do with national politics than anything else.
Now it’s Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, and his flying Latin American migrants on a private plane from near the Mexico border to Sacramento in order to make an annoying and grandstanding national political point.
It has to be a national point that he is hoping to make, because it is not as if Californians are unaware of the fact that there’s a terrible crisis at the border, and that many immigrants are clamoring to come into the United States for work rather than stay to face the economic and humanitarian crises in their own countries.
The three dozen no doubt bewildered, mostly Venezuelan people DeSantis sent to our state capital won’t make a difference in the reality of America’s immigration crisis, which needs to be dealt with by congressional action, not by treating people as symbolic pawns in a campaign for the White House. But the Florida governor certainly hopes they will make a difference in his effort to show that he can give just as good as a certain former president when it comes to brash, one-upping, headline-grabbing moves.
“The easiest way to prove one’s tribal loyalty in 2020s America is by theatrically hating the other tribe,” Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told The New York Times when asked about the charter-flight gambit.
Newsom doesn’t help when he tweets that DeSantis is a “small, pathetic man.” But voters need to reject such symbolism and demand substance.
—The Editorial Board, Southern California News Group
