Wanna-be governor begins campaign with an appeal to xenophobes
The young actor featured in Richard Corcoran’s shameless appeal to Florida xenophobes fairly exuded “white woman.” Alabaster complexion. Nordic blue eyes. Strawberry blonde.
The setting was decidedly non-urban, if you know what I mean: a cul-de-sac of nice, middle-class homes with neatly mowed lawns in all-American suburbia.
The Corcoran-not-yet-declared-for-governor campaign PAC introduced the TV ad in North and Central Florida on Monday. (South Florida, with its swarthy demographics, might not be so receptive.) The white girl innocent walks along, smiling, perusing her smartphone, hardly noticing a sinister figure approaching from the other direction — furtive, facial hair, vaguely foreign, the telltale hoodie (think Trayvon Martin). She pays him no mind though his character was obviously contrived to look as out-of-place as a taco stand on Worth Avenue.
It ain’t subtle, Corcoran’s unseemly homage to the Willie Horton ad Republicans unleashed against Michael Dukakis three decades ago. A scary Hispanic dude was substituted for the scary black dude and an infamously divisive strategy was revived, still good for provoking racial animus after all these years.
The unsuspecting woman passes the skulking alien. He stops, pulls out a pistol. She pauses, turns, eyes wide with horror. Then, for no apparent reason other than he’s an illegal immigrant with the usual illegal-immigrantwhite-girl-killing propensities, he shoots her.
Out of the ether comes the voice of our very speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, explaining, “A young woman who should have been protected is gunned-down by an illegal immigrant who should have been deported but was protected by a sanctuary city.”
Next scene, we see the grim-faced Corcoran. “When I heard about Kate Steinle’s story,” he says, “I thought about my own daughter Kate, and how this could have happened to any family, anywhere.” he said.
He was referring Kate Steinle, who was killed by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco in 2015 — a tragedy often recounted by President Trump as he rails against immigrants sneaking across unprotected borders.
Except, the Steinle shooting was not quite so simple. The 32-year-old woman was hit by a bullet from a pistol that had been wielded by Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant who had been deported several times but kept returning. Garcia Zarate was seated on a bench when the pistol fired, accidentally he claimed. The bullet struck the ground 12 feet in front of his bench, then ricocheted another 78 feet before striking Steinle in the back.
Evidence of ill intent proved elusive. Last month, a jury cleared Garcia Zarate of murder charges, a verdict Donald Trump called “disgraceful.” Apparently, Trump and Corcoran are not fans of the jury system.
Corcoran, previously known for ruthless budget cutting, seems to have calculated that bloodless fiscal conservatism won’t wow the zealots he’ll need to win the Republican gubernatorial primary. So he’s gone all Trumpy on us. (His ad comes two weeks after Trump’s campaign PAC released a TV spot declaring congressional Democrats “complicit” in any murders by committed by illegal immigrants.)
Or perhaps Corcoran has decided to emulate his former colleague in the Florida House, Matt Gaetz, a chipmunk-cheeked freshman congressman from Okaloosa County, hardly known outside the Panhandle until he turned total Trump.
Gaetz has become semi-famous as a ubiquitous cable news crazy-talk guestie who never waivers in his defense of even the most outrageous presidential pronouncements. On MSNBC, he defended Trump’s vulgar slur against Haiti and other third world nations by declaring, “I mean, everywhere you look in Haiti, it’s sheet metal and garbage.”
Gaetz supplements interviews with his own brand of bombast, declaring that he wants to exclude Syrian war refugees from the U.S., allow the NRA to ghost-write gun laws, abolish the Department of Education, designate Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization and purge the FBI of anti-Trump conspirators.
Just last week, Gaetz invited Chuck Johnson — a notorious Holocaust-denier, misogynist and white nationalist troll, so nasty (according to Politico) that he has been banned from Twitter — to Trump’s state of the union address.
Like Corcoran, Gaetz panders to Donald Trump’s electoral base by promising to “crack down on sanctuary cities and the local officials that allow them to exist.”
Speaker Corcoran has shepherded a bill through the Florida House that would do just that: bar cities from refusing to help the feds round up and retain suspected undocumented immigrants and dole out harsh penalties for local governments and elected officials who refuse to kowtow to the new Trump reality.
His bill, so far, hasn’t done so well in the Florida Senate, where it bogged down in a key committee on Tuesday. The measure was constitutionally suspect anyway. (A Texas version is hung up in a federal appeals court).
Besides, as the Sun Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reported last week, there’s only one alleged sanctuary city in Florida under threat from the Trump administration. That’s West Palm Beach. City officials deny that they’re out of compliance with federal law. Still, West Palm might not be a promising market for Richard Corcoran’s hate-mongering campaign ad.
Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@ gmail.com) has worked as a reporter or columnist in South Florida since 1976.