The clumsiness of our president they look like have no limits. in a lousy political moment, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attacked the Florida Governor Ron de Santisfor their anti-immigrant policies. She must have remembered the big mouth, small tail axiom. If he meddles in electoral process in USA Calling on Mexicans not to vote for a specific candidate, who then does not claim that from there they ask not to vote for their dolphin Claudia Sheinbaumor whoever is appointed successoror by candidates to those who point out to be linked to the drug trafficking. Now, to launch against De Santis in the days when he prepared the start of his presidential candidacy? As López Obrador says, De Santis scratched himself with him.
Lopez Obrador criticized De Santis when attention was focused on the border with USA for him end of Title 42 and the beginning of Title 8and the villain was the Texas Governor Gregg Abbott. De Santis had started last week with a censorship of the 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, his 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 much higher support than he got ted cross in 2016. The governor of Florida won the support of more than a dozen legislatorsincluding all leaders of the Senate and Congress locals, surpassing the former president in endorsements donald trumpwho claimed to have 11 legislators and local leaders and activists in his pocket, which he 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 bad weather conditions, 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 it 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 against 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 the drug cartelsand all the millions of people who come to our country are passing through yours. What kind of country allows millions of people to pass through like this?
Lopez Obrador she no longer answered him, but she put her gloves against her senator of Louisiana, John Neeley Kennedy -no relation to the liberal Bostonian dynasty of the kennedy family-, after having said something racist stupid: “Mexico would be eating cat food from 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 only reached that chamber in 2017. He was re-elected last year with 62% of the vote and is one of the five senators who objected to the electoral results in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, which brought victory to Biden. Paradoxically, López Obrador and Kennedy are on the same ideological side, unconditionally supporting Trump. López Obrador should never have fought with him, nor the foreign minister Marcelo Ebrardor much less, because he has to deal with it 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 against 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 many Americans. They must be treated like the hostile force that they are. We must hold them accountable and we need to do responsible to the mexican governmentBecause you are 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 topics campaign nationals, are the immigration, Lopez Obradorthe drug cartels and the fentanyl.
De Santis still trails Trump in electoral preferences, partly because of a tactical error, his critics say, and a wait to mature his candidacy, his loyalists say, having hesitated to launch his candidacy at the beginning of the year, which created a vacuum filled by Trump. Today he is on the starting line to go for the White House next year, taking up what Trump was saying about MexicoLópez 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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