The Phoenix Flyer

Want to see Gov. DeSantis? Pick your press conference

By: Julie Hauserman - April 2, 2019 11:14 am

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Have you been seeing a lot of news about Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis lately? That’s no accident. DeSantis is holding a lot of press conferences.

Take today, for example. DeSantis is in Tallahassee, and he (and, in some appearances, the first lady Casey Desantis) are having four press conferences; one at 10:30 am, one at 11, one at 11:45, one at 1 pm, plus he’ll be at the Enterprise Florida meeting at Florida A&M University in the afternoon (media invited).

At lunch, he and Casey DeSantis are meeting with Venezuela’s Fabiana Rosales, wife of Juan Guaidó, the man who declared himself interim president of Venezuela in a challenge to Nicolás Maduro. In the official schedule, the governor refers to Rosales as “First Lady of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

The Tallahassee press corps is running around covering all of the carefully arranged media events – a sharp contrast to the administration of former Gov. (now U.S. Senator) Rick Scott, who was stingy with his media appearances. It’s a good bet DeSantis will appear statewide on screens, radios and newspapers today and tomorrow.

Before he was governor, DeSantis appeared numerous times on Fox News to defend Donald Trump. And DeSantis may be taking a page from his close advisor, Florida Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a provocateur who who gets all the media attention he can – good and bad.

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Julie Hauserman

Julie Hauserman has been writing about Florida for more than 30 years. She is a former Capitol bureau reporter for the St. Petersburg (Tampa Bay) Times, and reported for The Stuart News and the Tallahassee Democrat. She was a national commentator for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday and The Splendid Table . She has won many awards, including two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is featured in several Florida anthologies, including The Wild Heart of Florida , The Book of the Everglades , and Between Two Rivers . Her new book is Drawn to The Deep, a University Press of Florida biography of Florida cave diver and National Geographic explorer Wes Skiles.