By now anyone who follows politics knows that Iowa fumbled the political football on Monday night, failing to announce any results whatsoever, as late as 4am Eastern Time. CNN was in full rage mode, which is understandable given the network had already been forced to cancel a one-hour special planned over the weekend when polling results were found to be tainted. Last night, Wolf Blitzer and a slate of high-powered guests were on stand by to announce the results of the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses.
As the talking heads twiddled their thumbs for hours on end, CNN began to trash Iowa and the state Democratic Party.
“Embarrassing,” Wolf Blitzer declared. “Give us some information on this delay! Hour after hour.”
Others had equally harsh words.
“It’s starting to look like a debacle,” said Van Jones.
But there was one guest who saw an opportunity to bash his home state of Florida. Andrew Gillum, a regular contributor to CNN, made an appearance last night, and took an easy shot at Iowa by using Florida as a foil.
“Finally, there’s a state worse than Florida,” Gillum declared.
It only went downhill from there. Gillum compared Iowa’s situation to historical vote tabulation problems in Florida, except instead of laying the blame at the feet of incompetent election supervisors like Brenda Snipes, Gillum played the race card (again) by lamenting that Florida’s problems seemed to occur at higher frequencies in “brown” or “black” communities in Florida.
Playing the race card has become default mode for Gillum, who did it repeatedly in the 2018 governor’s race against Ron DeSantis.
But that wasn’t the worst thing Gillum did last night. After discussing some of the presidential candidates’ reactions to the lack of caucus results, Gillum dropped the revelation that if he were a candidate in Iowa who thought he might lose, he would undermine the ultimate outcome by calling the entire process into question.
U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz caught the remarks and called him out on Twitter:
“If I was losing I might throw some wrenches in that thing and say I have more questions” – @AndrewGillum on @CNN on the #IowaCaucusFail
It was also exactly what Gillum did when he was losing the Florida Governor’s race to @RonDeSantisFL. https://t.co/gbm03OqhfP
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 4, 2020
Gillum later contradicted himself, and his own past actions, by calling on the presidential candidates to proceed with caution:
“Unless there is proof that there was something illegal, untoward, that took place during this period of time of waiting, I think we oughta pump our brakes, hold our horses, and let’s just see what comes out. It’s unacceptable but let’s see what comes out.”
Gillum remained on the program for at least an hour after that point and managed to avoid any further damage to himself or his state.