DeSantis On The Stump
I watched Ron DeSantis deliver his soon-to-be presidential stump speech in Iowa so you didn't have to.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can sign up here.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to Iowa last week to see Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s initial appearance on the campaign trail. But I did watch his appearance at an event with the state’s governor Kim Reynolds on Friday. Here are a few thoughts.
DeSantis lies … a lot. I know it will not come as a considerable shock, but it was still pretty striking to see how flagrantly he says things that are not true. One example stuck out for me. DeSantis bragged about deporting dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. That he boasted about treating innocent people (these migrants) as bit players in a political stunt is gross. But that notwithstanding, DeSantis claimed that the migrants who arrived in Martha’s Vineyard were “illegal immigrants” and “were deported the next day.” That isn’t true. In fact, the migrants were not in the country illegally, and they were welcomed with open arms by the residents of Martha’s Vineyard. Within days they were moved to an immigration center. They left the island after two days because Martha’s Vineyard lacked the infrastructure to care for them. But when DeSantis says they were deported, he is lying. You will be shocked to hear that his attack on “illegal immigration” received the loudest applause.
DeSantis will run on his COVID record. This decision is bizarre when you consider that Florida ranked 13th in COVID deaths per capita. When it comes to the number of COVID cases per capita, Florida was 9th. In all, more than 86,000 Floridians died from the COVID pandemic. But DeSantis never mentions these numbers. He expresses no sorrow for the lives lost. Instead, he says, “my job is to protect the jobs of the people I represent … I can’t be looking out for me and the short-term political over people’s liberties, freedom and jobs.” Again, there is absolutely no mention of public health and DeSantis's responsibility to look out for the well-being of his constituents.
In fact, DeSantis makes a point of rejecting nearly all public health regulations intended to keep people safe from COVID (at one point, he refers to a Faucian dystopia). He claims that he was proven right and the “expert class was proven wrong on lockdown, masks, and school closures” (his claim on masks is undoubtedly incorrect). He even goes into tin foil hat territory but saying the experts were wrong about “rejecting natural immunity” as a way of dealing with COVID and says they were wrong about the “efficacy of MRNA jabs,” which is a roundabout way of saying they were wrong about the effectiveness of vaccines. Yes, he’s an anti-vaxxer. Finally, DeSantis claims that the experts “lied” about COVID emanating from a wet market in China “when we knew it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” This is not true. We don’t know, with certainty, the origins of COVID.
DeSantis is a divider, not an uniter. At the opening of his remarks, DeSantis said that while he won 50% of the vote in the 2018 Florida Governor’s race, he earned “100 percent of the executive authority,” and he intended to use that power to advance his policy agenda. And he goes on to say that for those members of Florida’s state government who weren’t entirely on board with his agenda, “we sent [those] people packing.” The implication was clear: it’s DeSantis’s way or the highway.
From the standpoint of a Republican primary, I get the political choice DeSantis is making. GOP voters like alpha male politicians who pledge to get things done and push their liberal opponents aside. And DeSantis's stump speech is full of that kind of posturing. He crows about “beating the left” and says they hate everything he’s doing in Florida. He takes great pride in pissing off his political opponents. This is catnip for GOP voters. But what’s missing is any attempt to meet his political opponents halfway.
Every politician who runs for their party’s nomination seeks to appeal, first and foremost, to members of their party. But they usually focus on messaging and themes that have the potential to appeal to non-party members. For example, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed liberal policy agendas. Still, their anti-business message, broadsides against millionaires and billionaires, and calls for cleaning up corruption in Washington had the power to resonate with non-partisans. An effective presidential campaign message, particularly during the nomination fight, is focused on party voters, but it rarely ignores or even inflames the rest of the electorate.
DeSantis’s message is all red meat, culture war politics, and grievance. At various points, he brags about all the people who have moved to Florida and says anecdotally that many have told him they “escaped” from Iowa, Illinois, New York, and Michigan. At the end of his remarks, he goes on a long tangent boasting about his education record in Florida — and banning “pornography” and “critical race theory” from the state’s public schools. He talks about taking on Mickey Mouse and Disney. Not surprisingly, the partisan crowds in Iowa ate all this up. Perhaps the most striking thing about DeSantis’s stump speech is that he does not mention the economy or jobs (outside all the ones he allegedly protected during COVID). I don’t think I’ve ever heard a presidential aspirant simply ignore an issue usually at the forefront of modern campaigning.
It’s all about Ron. There was something else very odd about DeSantis’s speech, and it took me a while to put my finger on it — he talked almost exclusively about himself but not necessarily in the way you might expect. Often early in a campaign, candidates will take time to introduce themselves. They’ll weave their personal story with their politics and policy agenda. Elizabeth Warren was a master of doing that during the 2020 campaign. Few people have done it better than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s an effective way to humanize a candidate and show how their political beliefs are an extension of who they are as a person. It makes a candidate sound more genuine and authentic. DeSantis doesn’t bother to do any of this, and I found this particularly surprising since he has yet to announce his candidacy — and he’s nominally in Iowa to promote his new book. This would be the perfect time to talk about himself since he’s somewhat limited in talking about his plans as president.
At the end of his remarks, DeSantis hurries through a story about getting married at Disneyworld but tells it only to claim that his war against the Disney Corporation isn’t personal (and he only mentions in passing that he has three kids under the age of six). When Reynolds asked him at one point to talk about his wife Casey, who had been diagnosed with cancer, he pivoted instead to talk about her work raising awareness among kids about drug use. Reynolds asked another softball question about DeSantis’s background as a baseball player (he played in the Little League World Series) and refused to take the bait, instead ending the event. If anything, DeSantis appears deeply uncomfortable talking about his family and personal life, which is a tricky stance for a politician running for president.
DeSantis focuses almost exclusively on his Florida policy record and chalks up its success to his leadership (and that alone). It’s all about him and his vision. As a result, he ends up identifying himself with his divisive policy agenda as if the two are inseparable. I get how this is an effective strategy when you’re running in a Republican primary, but it’s a very problematic approach if or when you someday need to appeal to non-partisans. Presidential candidates need to make themselves accessible and approachable to voters. They need to speak in aspirational terms and present themselves as a candidate that any American could support. DeSantis, it seems, would rather voters think of him as a culture warrior who liberals despise. I am very skeptical that it will work, and I suspect DeSantis is making a strategic error in campaigning this way. He appears so dead set on telling GOP partisans what they want to hear he’s forgotten that to get elected president; you need to win over a few folks who aren’t Republican.
What’s Going On
Yes, masks work.
DeSantis’s decision to remove a Democratic prosecutor is looking increasingly sketchy.
In what is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the modern Republican Party, the Republican strategist who accused Matt Schlapp of sexually assaulting him has now been accused of sexual assault himself.
Leonard Leo, who, as head of the Federalist Society, seeded the federal courts with conservative judges, is now spreading his wings … to “crush liberal dominance.”
Musical Interlude
I couldn’t think of a good song related to today’s newsletter’s theme, so I just went with a few songs from albums I’ve been listening to recently.
Thanks for the rundown on DeSantis’s Iowa pitch.While his proclivity for stark partisanship and divisiveness is potentially limiting, it is also feels potentially galvanizing for the right, especially when compared to the unfocused, narcissistic meanderings of Trump’s speeches. He does pretty well at focusing on the most divisive, dis-unifying issues. In a Republican ecosystem looking for coherence and a clear “directionality,” he may end-up being just what the acolytes and the confused and disappointed want.