(C) Florida Phoenix This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Off the presidential trail, DeSantis jabs at the Bidens, fails to mention his campaign problems [1] ['Michael Moline', 'More From Author', '- July'] Date: 2023-07-26 Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Florida Wednesday to deliver a speech to a national group of conservative state legislators in Orlando. He used the occasion to deliver a series of slaps at the Biden administration — some political, some highly personal. For example, during a discussion of parental rights in education, DeSantis referred to Joe Biden’s granddaughter in Arkansas, fathered by Hunter Biden but whom the president and his son have never met, according to reporting by The New York Times. (A federal judge that same day rejected a plea bargain for Hunter Biden on federal tax and gun charges, as CNN reported.) The governor noted the president’s suggestion that the whole nation is responsible for the upbringing of children. “Now, he’s not talking about visiting his granddaughter in Arkansas or even acknowledging that she exists, but never mind that, right?” DeSantis said. DeSantis, who has been crisscrossing the country raising money and campaigning for president, did not open up about the campaign problems plaguing that effort: his firing of a staffer who inserted neo-Nazi images in a video spot; his layoff of dozens of campaign workers amid a fundraising slump; a rear-end collision involving four government vehicles Tuesday in Tennessee; his disappointing polling performance. He participated Wednesday in the annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that produces model legislation for introduction in individual state legislatures. The governor did lash out at Vice President Kamala Harris, who in Jacksonville this week attacked Florida’s new African American history standards, which suggest Blacks benefited from slavery. DeSantis said an expert panel developed the standards to expunge so-called “critical race theory” from classrooms. “You now have people like Kamala Harris trying to perpetuate a hoax, saying that these African American history scholars, many of whom were black, some of them who descended from slaves, are creating a curriculum saying it was good? Are you kidding me? Who believes such nonsense?” DeSantis said. Book ban ‘hoax’ He decried as a “hoax” complaints that his administration is banning books from schools, arguing that they remain available through other sources. However, Florida law allows private citizens, not necessarily even parents, to complain about written material and remove it from classrooms and school library shelves, effectively censoring them. DeSantis and his supporters have described some of these books, mostly dealing with LGBTQ+ topics and race relations, as pornographic, although they include anodyne titles including “And Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins raising a chick. PEN American estimated that as of December 357 books had been removed from Florida schools; see this Tampa Bay Times analysis. Penguin Random House and PEN are suing Escambia County schools over book removals. “Adult material shouldn’t be in a fourth-grade classroom. You wanna look at adult material, go look at Hunter Biden’s laptop for all I care,” DeSantis said. DeSantis claimed that Florida has led the nation in economic and social growth due to his off-hands policies during the COVID pandemic — again, he didn’t mention that he did issue a stay-home order and closed schools early in the pandemic. “This country is in a state of decline — economic decline, military decline, cultural decline. And if we look at states that are governed by leftist politicians wielding leftist ideology, those states are symptomatic of the larger decline in our country,” DeSantis said. “The decline of our country, though, is not inevitable. The decline is a choice. It’s a choice we as Americans will be making in the ensuing months and years. I believe that Florida shows the way to reverse our nation’s decline, restore sanity to our society, and usher into this country a new birth of freedom.” Economic agenda DeSantis spelled out an economic agenda for a presidency, blaming “government-induced problems” including inflation that he laid at the feet of COVID relief spending by the federal government. Between the Trump and Biden administrations, the feds injected some $5 billion into the economy. Economists note that other factors contributed, including pandemic-induced supply chain clogs. He blamed the Federal Reserve System for manipulating the economy. “Their job at the Fed should simply be to maintain stable prices, not to be an economic central planner, not to worry about social issues or climate change or any of that stuff,” DeSantis said. The Federal Reserve’s official mission is to oversee the financial system and individual banks and seek to ensure “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy,” among other responsibilities, according to its website. DeSantis invoked familiar bugaboos, including alleged efforts by financial institutions to control personal behavior through lending policies and “ESG” investing, which means applying environmental, social, and governance considerations when deciding which companies to bet on, which he views as an extraconstitutional attempt to assert liberal priorities. He didn’t attack the “administrative state” by name — essentially, the federal bureaucracy and expansive presidential authority. To conservatives, this undermines the principle of limited government, and they have been attacking the bureaucracy along avenues including the federal courts. The words he used were “fourth branch of government, which is not constitutionally accountable to the electorate.” “We really have a mission in front of us to constitutionalize this government,” DeSantis said. [END] --- [1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/07/26/off-the-presidential-trail-desantis-jabs-at-the-bidens-fails-to-mention-his-campaign-problems/ Published and (C) by Florida Phoenix Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/floridaphoenix/