Politico's Playbook is a daily feature, sent by email to a large list of subscribers, heavily concentrated among professional political insiders.  Companies "sponsor" it — reportedly costing $60,000 a week in 2018 — in hopes of goodwill from the movers and shakers who read it.

As regards Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, Friday's Playbook (online here) was, as a friend wrote, "a ham handed effort to suggest to Republicans that he won't win the White House, since he has not built up a strong team of advisors and treats aides badly.  It's pretty obvious Dems fear him, as Politico is one of their many mouthpieces."

Here is the introduction.  Go here to read the whole thing.

Is "People's Republic of Florida" supposed to be witty?  If so, it only half succeeded:

But first, a look at the leader of the People's Republic of Florida as a boss …

RON DESANTIS is looking ahead to reelection next year and quite possibly a 2024 bid for president — but he's left behind a trail of former disgruntled staffers and has no long-standing political machine to mount a national campaign, DeSantis vets say.

We talked to a dozen or so onetime aides and consultants to the Florida governor, and they all said the same thing: DeSantis treats staff like expendable widgets. He largely relies on a brain trust of two: himself and his wife, CASEY DESANTIS, a former local TV journalist. Beyond that there are few, if any, "DeSantis people," as far as political pros are concerned.

Yes, DeSantis recently hired highly regarded operative PHIL COX. But there's no savant that he's been through the trenches with, like a KARL ROVE or DAVID AXELROD — let alone an army of loyalists. That's probably not fatal to his White House prospects, but it can't help.

A few key nuggets from our reporting:

— A "support group" of former DeSantis staffers meets regularly to trade war stories about their hardship working for the governor. The turnover in his office and among his campaign advisers is well known among Republicans: In three of his five full years in Congress, he ranked in at least the 70th percentile in terms of highest turnover in a House office, according to data compiled by Legistorm. In the governor's office, he has only two staffers who started with him when he was a junior member of Congress.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.