Former Dem Golden Boy Back In Jail After Testing Positive For Meth

Andrew Gillum was, for about five minutes in 2018, the future of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama campaigned for him. He came within a percentage point of running Florida. Pundits talked about him as a national figure who could reshape the map. Now he's back in jail a month after a drug arrest because he failed a meth test, and the same people who built him up have gone conspicuously quiet.

That's not a cheap shot at one man's struggles. Addiction is real and it's ugly and plenty of people across the political spectrum have lived through some version of what Gillum is going through. The point is what happened before the addiction became impossible to ignore. There were warning signs for years, a corruption investigation, a hotel room scandal, a federal indictment on wire fraud and lying to the FBI that ended in a mistrial. Through all of it, he stayed a folk hero to people who needed a story about Florida almost turning blue.

Nobody forced Democrats to lionize him. They chose to, because the narrative was useful. A young, charismatic Black mayor almost beating Ron DeSantis fit the story they wanted to tell about where the country was heading. When the story stopped fitting, he got dropped, not helped. That's the part worth sitting with, more than the mugshot.

We wish him an actual recovery, sincerely. But it's fair to ask why a party so eager to talk about compassion and second chances mostly talks about Gillum in the past tense now.