Sometimes, even the Vice President of the United States gets routed to voicemail.
That’s a takeaway from NBC News reporting about Vice President Kamala Harris not being able to get through to Gov. Ron DeSantis in the hours before Hurricane Milton promises a historical and devastating impact to Southwest Florida, the Interstate 4 Corridor and other areas in the path of the fearsome Category 5 storm.
The calls, per a DeSantis aide, “seemed political,” prompting the Governor to ignore them.
“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” the claim goes, as reported by Matt Dixon of NBC News.
The Governor said that wasn’t how it went down though.
“I didn’t know she called me. I saw that but I was not aware of that,” he told reporters Monday at the state Emergency Operations Center.
President Joe Biden approved the state’s pre-landfall declaration Monday, and DeSantis addressed that as well.
“At this point, it seems like the President has approved what we asked for. We’re thankful for that. If there’s something we need that they don’t approve, I will not hesitate to call him,” he said.
The Governor, who politicized the aftermath of Helene by sending Florida forces because he didn’t think the feds were doing enough in the Blue Ridge Mountains, added that certain “questions are trying to create some type of political angle where there’s just none there.”
“What we’ve asked for has been approved. You’re not seeing me out there carping or complaining about anything. We have gotten what we need from the feds.”
The apparent pause on politics notwithstanding, the lack of dialogue between Harris and DeSantis is the latest data point in a chilly dynamic between the two.
The Governor has called Harris a “vapid San Francisco leftist” and an “economic arsonist” since she became the Democratic presidential nominee.
Before that, he described her as an “insurance policy” to protect Biden from being removed from office.
DeSantis snubbed Biden during his tour of storm damage after Hurricane Helene, scheduling a low-priority press conference a 40-minute flight away from Tallahassee when Biden arrived.
He was coy when asked why.
“No reason. We had this planned,” DeSantis said to reporters during a news conference with other state officials in Anna Maria.
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