Gov. Kemp Goes on a Fellow Governor's Podcast to Credit the Other Party's President With Delivering What the Governor's Own Party Couldn't
The fighter-jet mission had eluded the state for decades; the host, who would like to be president, listened with the expression of a man being handed an opponent's ad
Ink = the flip (fiction). Red = real Republican · Blue = real Democrat.
ATLANTA — Gov. Kemp sat down this week on the podcast of a fellow-party governor with well-advertised national ambitions and used the time to praise the sitting president of the other party for landing a new fighter-jet mission at an Air National Guard base back home — a prize local officials had chased for decades and that, Kemp noted, the previous administration, of the governor's own party, could not get across the finish line.
The mission, worth thousands of jobs and roughly $850 million a year to the regional economy, is by any measure a genuine achievement, which is what made the podcast so awkward: it is difficult to say 'the other side delivered where we didn't' into a microphone owned by a man whose entire pitch is that the other side does not deliver.
Kemp's office has framed the episode as evidence that the governor works with anyone to get results — a bipartisan credential the governor is expected to carry into whatever comes next. The opposing party circulated the clip within hours under the heading 'even they admit it,' and the governor's own party spent the afternoon explaining that a governor is obligated to thank whoever signs the paperwork, which is true and which no one in either party has ever said about a governor from the other one.
The Press's protocol desk observes that praising the other party's president is the single most dangerous act a governor can commit in a primary and the single most valuable one in a general, and that every governor knows the calendar.
Reaction followed the standing choreography. Voters aligned with the president heard an honest opponent giving credit where it was due; voters aligned with the governor heard a friend handing the enemy a campaign ad. The Press archives confirm both parties own the vocabulary — 'putting the state above politics' and 'stabbing the party in the back' — and swap it, on air, whenever the other side's governor is the one saying thank you.
The fighter jets, sources confirm, will arrive regardless of who is thanked.
📜 The Receipts
What actually happened: On Gov. Gavin Newsom's podcast, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) credited President Trump with helping her secure a new F-15EX fighter mission at Selfridge Air National Guard Base — something she said she couldn't get done under President Biden — after decades of failed attempts; the mission supports thousands of jobs and roughly $850 million in annual economic impact.