The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

American governors are very much in the news these days. Mostly, it’s for the wrong reasons.

On Tuesday, New York chief executive Andrew Cuomo finally gave in and resigned his position after what must have been an excruciating ten days. Even considering this man’s extraordinary self-assurance and self-belief, his public pillorying by members of his own party had to be a humiliating punctuation to his previously successful and apparently secure tenure in the Governor’s mansion in Albany.

Cuomo, whose seemingly decisive, clear-eyed and even inspirational leadership of the Empire State during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic had made him a reassuring counterpoint to the lazy, dismissive and mendacious approach of then-President Donald Trump, was riding high not so very long ago.

He even wrote a book about his triumphant performance. But that was before it was revealed his ballyhooed success was created partly by papering over some scandalously bad public health reports from New York’s nursing homes and the disclosure that the book may have been largely written by aides on the state payroll.

And that was also before 11 women came forward, hesitantly and anonymously at first, and charged that he had at the very least behaved inappropriately in his interactions with them. There was allegedly unwanted touching, sexual innuendo and the kind of disrespectful, demeaning behaviour to which women in the workplace everywhere in the world have for too long been accustomed and until relatively recently, relatively resigned.

Cuomo’s alleged predation was also apparently abetted by a senior aide, Melissa DeRosa, who may have been an accomplice/enabler, and whose actions have been compared with female aides to disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, wealthy sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in a New York City jail, and former Fox News executive and longtime Republican attack dog Roger Ailes.

It’s a disreputable group that Cuomo has now joined. A largely distinguished family history in the New York statehouse – his father was also governor – has now been blighted by a scandal that looks to have been entirely of Andrew Cuomo’s making.

That he is clearly bright enough to have understood what he was doing and didn’t care enough or feel sufficiently constrained by the ethical and moral expectations implicit in his high office just makes the whole sordid mess worse.

New York gubernatorial tickets often consist of a New York City-endorsed candidate at the top and someone from “Upstate” New York to provide geographic balance as the Lieutenant Governor candidate. This was also true of Cuomo’s running mate, current Lieutenant Governor and former Buffalo-area congresswoman Kathy Hochul, who now will take over as New York’s first-ever female Governor.

Few missed the irony that the first woman Governor of New York will assume the state’s highest office after an avalanche of credible sexual misconduct charges torpedoed the tenure of her male predecessor.

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Cuomo has hardly been the only US Governor featured regularly on “Breaking News” on cable and network TV during the past week.

Equally visible has been Florida’s Ron DeSantis who, when he was sworn in as Governor in 2018 became the youngest state chief executive in the country.

But while the troubles and political demise of Governor Cuomo may be entertaining and perhaps hasten the end of certain kinds of sexual predation, what happens in Florida makes a huge difference in The Bahamas.

It’s worthwhile to take a closer look at Ron DeSantis and his political prospects, because they matter a lot for us.

DeSantis was elected Governor three years ago by just 0.4 percent, or 32,000 votes. Liberal pundits are delighting in reporting the fact that Florida’s COVID-19 death toll, probably inflated by DeSantis’ anti-masking and defiant virus-diminishing policies, has now nearly reached 40,000 – 25 percent more than his margin of victory over black Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum.

In discussing DeSantis with reporters, an analyst with the non-partisan Cook Political Report said “he has staked so much more on downplaying the virus than any Republican currently in office and that is playing well with the base.”

That seems to be the main idea for Florida’s Governor, who is now widely viewed outside and inside the state as a shameless opportunist trying to capture Trump’s base of support for a possible presidential run in 2024.

Respected Washington, DC, insider publication The Hill has printed several analyses of DeSantis in recent weeks. The gist of them is the Florida Governor, while doubling down on his defiance of mask mandates from either President Biden or local Sunshine State school boards, is running a high-risk campaign to get in position to sweep the 2024 GOP presidential primary elections.

Then, so the theory goes, he could follow a traditional Republican playbook and edge toward the centre prior to the general election several months later.

Maybe that will work. Political opponents are already charging that ambitious DeSantis is using Florida only as a stepping stone to the White House. He has reportedly raised almost $40 million for a possible presidential campaign already, most of it from outside the state.

Tall and with an aw-shucks, everyman kind of handsomeness and piercing blue eyes, DeSantis possesses assets that make him hard to ignore.

Until he was “discovered” and endorsed by Trump for his 2018 gubernatorial run, DeSantis had amassed a quite impressive resume. Born and raised in Florida and later captain of the Yale baseball team (like former President George H W Bush) and holder of a Harvard law degree, DeSantis served hitches in the Army’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps and as a federal prosecutor prior to winning election to the House of Representatives.

His family is attractive and wholesome-looking. His wife is an experienced television news reporter and presenter. It is little wonder Democrats have taken careful notice of this rising political star and are trying to unite to upset him in his inevitable run for re-election next year.

At the moment, the most likely Democratic challenger is Florida political veteran Charlie Crist, who used to be a Republican and also used to be Governor of the state ten years ago. Crist is currently representing the Tampa Bay area cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater in the House of Representatives.

Meantime, as Crist ramps up his attacks on the Governor, DeSantis is taking a hit in his approval ratings. In fact, his approval rating fell to 43.7 percent in a new poll published last week.

The survey from St Pete Polls was conducted at the beginning of this month. It shows the Republican Governor losing re-election in a hypothetical match-up with Crist.

Poll respondents disapproved of DeSantis’ performance by a margin of five percentage points. A different poll taken in May had showed the Governor’s approval rating at 55 percent. This is an unusually precipitous drop in a relatively short time, and is ascribed to the scary spread of the Delta variant in Florida for which it is not difficult to implicate the Governor and his policies.

When asked if masks “should be required for all children” when the state’s schools reopen, 62 percent said they should be. DeSantis has made anti-mask mandates a hallmark of his tenure.

Instead, DeSantis has fired back at Biden, criticizing the “wide-open southern border” with Mexico, charging that all kinds of viruses were pouring into the US via that route. DeSantis even said the President was “facilitating” the virus with his lax border enforcement.

“Whatever variants are around the world, they’re coming across that southern border. He’s not shutting down the virus, he’s helping to facilitate it,” the Governor said.

Given our close relationship with the state of Florida here in The Bahamas, DeSantis and his policies toward the current coronavirus pandemic are worth watching very carefully.

The longer Florida’s Governor continues to push policies that appear to foster the spread of this deadly disease, the more protracted will be our exposure here.

Ironically, as DeSantis promotes “economic freedom” and open businesses and schools without masks in Florida, the likely result here in The Bahamas will be a continued suppression of our vital tourist industry and of our economy as a whole.

It’s for certain that those in the Prime Minister’s office and elsewhere in the government are warily tracking Sunshine State public health developments. They are of paramount concern to all of us.