Biden coming to Florida for the Miami building collapse….

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Democrat Joe Biden will make his first trip to Florida as president to meet with the families of the dead and missing. He will likely appear beside Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, seen as a top-tier potential presidential candidate who might challenge Biden’s reelection in three years. Insiders in both administrations say they’re focusing on the crisis in Surfside, not on scoring political points.

But regardless of how the governor, president and staffs comport themselves, there are political pitfalls and consequences that have lasting electoral effects, as the 2012 relationship between Christie and Obama showed. Although the scope and scale of the two disasters are utterly different — Sandy killed fewer people than died in Surfside, but the storm caused wider devastation necessitating much more federal aid — the partisan political considerations are similar: Should DeSantis appear with Biden? Should they shake hands, or even hug? If either man uses the occasion to make a political argument, how should the other respond?

“The irony was people were calling saying [Christie] should put politics first, not his constituents: Put politics first, don’t appear with the president, don’t ask for help,” recalled DuHaime.

The White House and Florida governor’s office in Tallahassee are in talks to figure out each man’s schedule and whether and how each man will appear together on camera — essentially, what political professionals call the “optics” of such visits — at the same time the agencies under them are coordinating their response. DeSantis isn’t expected to greet the president at the airport, as Christie did in 2012, according to those familiar with DeSantis’s thinking….

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DeSantis has quickly risen to power in Florida politics and built a brand as a sharp-elbowed partisan warrior. He has been widely praised by Republicans and Democrats for his handling of the Surfside tragedy even after briefly heading to the Panhandle city of Pensacola the day after the condo collapse to announce the dispatching of state law enforcement officers to the border with Mexico. Biden, who has made bipartisanship a mantra for his administration, is primarily coming down as the Consoler-in-Chief, a man who has buried a wife, daughter and son over the years and established an identity as an avuncular figure with an instinctual empathy that connects deeply with grieving people….

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Update…..

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, sitting to Biden’s right at a table in Surfside, thanked the president for federal support in the eight-day rescue operation, which was paused Thursday due to safety concerns.

“This is your show. We just want to make sure [you have] whatever you need,” Biden told DeSantis.

DeSantis applauded the federal response, saying, “You guys have not only been supportive at the federal level, but we’ve had no bureaucracy. When we’re dealing with FEMA, we’re literally getting requests routed from local to state to federal in no time and the approval is happening.”

The Republican governor added, “What we just need now is we need a little bit of luck and a little bit of prayers, and we would like to be able to see some miracles happen.”….

top image….WPTV

bottom image…Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS