Every candidate for office is ultimately asking voters to trust his judgment when it matters most. So it is entirely fair to examine David Jolly’s judgment the last time the stakes were life and death.
In 2020 and 2021, as COVID tore through Florida, Jolly, now the leading Democrat candidate for governor, did two things at once. He heaped praise on Dr. Anthony Fauci while savaging Florida's pandemic response, siding with the expert who got it wrong over the state that got it right.
On camera, in comments highlighted by Florida’s Voice, the former Republican congressman called Fauci “a leading public health expert,” “a decent, kind man” and “a trusted person.” He also described him as “one of the most remarkable men,” “universally respected by both sides of the aisle,” with “an unimpeachable record.”
Unimpeachable. Remember that word.
Last weekend, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released pages from Fauci's diary covering the deadliest stretch of the pandemic. They do not read like the private thoughts of a selfless public servant carrying a nation's grief. They read like the thoughts of a man intoxicated by his own celebrity.
On May 21, 2020, as the national death toll climbed toward six figures, Fauci wrote: “Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”
Another entry read: “Press is going wild with me.”
Page after page, the daily body count and the day's press clippings share the same paragraph.
That is the record David Jolly called unimpeachable.
At the same time, Jolly was tearing into Florida. He said he “would not put [his] kids in a school in the state of Florida” and argued Pennsylvania’s governor had handled the virus better. He had a peculiar kind of standing to say so: he was not here. Jolly had moved his family to Pennsylvania, where the Tampa Bay Times reported he was “waiting out the pandemic.”
Sit with that. The man now asking to lead Florida spent the defining emergency of the decade outside Florida, insisting he would not trust Florida's schools with his own children. Those schools reopened while much of the country stayed shuttered, sparing Florida children some of the learning loss that scarred a generation.
He bet against Florida. Florida won.
And the expert on whom Jolly staked his credibility? This week, Fauci finally appeared before Paul's committee under subpoena and refused to answer. On questions ranging from the origins of the virus to entries in his own diary, the man Jolly called “unimpeachable” invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times.
Taking the Fifth is not proof of guilt. But it is hardly the final chapter anyone would expect from a public official whose record was supposedly beyond reproach. Fauci would not answer questions about the very record Jolly had held up as untouchable.
The contradiction could not be cleaner.
“An unimpeachable record” then. One hundred and eleven refusals to answer now.
This is not hindsight. Plenty of people questioned Fauci long before it became politically convenient. Byron Donalds, now the Republican frontrunner to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis, was challenging Fauci in real time while Jolly was praising him as “remarkable.”
That is the whole ballgame. Good judgment is not what you claim once the answers are obvious and the risk is gone. It is what you say in the moment, under pressure, when getting it wrong still carries a price.
Jolly's answer was to leave the state, run it down from a cabin in another one and stake his name, without a flicker of doubt, on the federal official whose credibility has since suffered the most spectacular collapse of the pandemic era.
A governor makes exactly these calls: whom to trust, whose expertise to weigh, when to take the advice and when to make the call himself.
On the biggest judgment test in a generation, David Jolly got the state wrong, got its schools wrong, and got Fauci wrong.
That is the judgment he is now asking Floridians to trust. They should not.