Is DeSantis Jeb 2.0?
There is a funny colloquialism about questions in headlines: If your headline contains a question, then the answer to the question is almost always, “No.” And while I would generally consider that to be true in this case, I think there are some things to note about Ron DeSantis’s all-but-started campaign for the Presidency.
DeSantis was a big part of the news this week because he committed what the Wall Street Journal called, his first big mistake:
But he may regret describing the war in Ukraine as a mere “territorial dispute.” This is flirting with GOP isolationism that has emerged from time to time in history and has usually been an electoral cul-de-sac. The party’s isolationism in the 1930s consigned it to decades in the wilderness, and that naivete was on national display when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The electoral stigma wasn’t removed until Dwight Eisenhower, the victor of D-Day, rescued the GOP from Republican Robert Taft’s unwillingness to support the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It sent large swaths of the conservative class into a tizzy, because for all of the anti-Ukraine stuff you see from Trump-aligned media, the general opinion of the Establishment GOP™ isn’t all that far off from Joe Biden’s. The Republican Senate and the majority of the Republican House have all expressed continued support for the funding of Ukraine and haven’t even come close to repeating Putin’s framing of the war as a “territorial dispute.” Jay Caruso - a member of the anti-anti-Trump portion of the conservative class - apparently got so upset about DeSantis’s flop that he deleted his Twitter.
Even a day after the remarks, Republicans in the Senate were still piling on. It was kind of a rug-pull from DeSantis, because a lot of Republicans thought they were “in” on his schtick. The long assumption has been that DeSantis makes infrequent overtures to Trumpism and can be given that space, but when it comes down to the real policy issues, he will be a normal, sane Republican, and provide a contrast with Trump in the primary. Instead, DeSantis has ended up hewing closer and closer to Trump’s ideology, which was - lest we forget - smacked down in both 2020 and 2022.
If you are wondering why DeSantis is taking this route, I don’t really have a great explanation. The things I have heard from people who are very familiar with Florida politics is that no one trusts Ron DeSantis more than Ron DeSantis. People who have worked for him have complained about his grating and combative press secretary, Christina Pushaw, who is apparently even nuttier in private than she is in public. DeSantis has been asked to fire or demote her multiple times, but he’s pulled closer to him (even shifted her to his Campaign) because he trusts his own judgment more than any else’s.
The truth is that ideologically, DeSantis is a little bit of a chameleon. Because he is very obviously running for President, DeSantis recently released a book, The Courage to be Free, but back in 2011 DeSantis wrote a very different book called, Dreams From Our Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama. That book is now mysteriously unavailable from Amazon, which is where I got my copy last year. Let’s just say that Ron’s views have evolved a little bit since 2011.
Here is what DeSantis said about Ukraine earlier this week:
While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.
But here is DeSantis dinging Obama for an article the latter wrote at Columbia (seriously):
He wrote an article for Columbia’s Sundial campus magazine titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” which lauded two leftist student groups for their dedication to the nuclear freeze movement and, Obama wrote, for their quests “to foster awareness and practical action necessary to counter the growing threat of war.” Writing during a time when President Ronald Reagan was rebuilding the nation’s military power, confronting the Soviet Union, and propelling America to an eventual victory in the Cold War, Obama noted the groups “share an aversion to current government policy,” are “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted, national priorities, [and] are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”
Nowadays, DeSantis’s policy positions are more in line with Obama’s while he attended Columbia. Here is DeSantis explicitly criticizing Obama for being soft on Vladimir Putin:
In a move designed to please Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, Obama scrapped plans to deploy a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. By reversing the pledge made to the Poles and the Czechs regarding missile defense, Obama hoped that his action would be taken by the Russians as a gesture of good faith, making them more likely to assist the U.S. with preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.
He later expounds on this:
From Obama’s assumption that strength was threatening and thus destabilizing flowed his strategy to display magnanimity to America’s enemies, to defer to foreign nations, and to criticize the United States. Obama reserved his most respectful treatment to foreign adversaries like Russia; in fact, he deliberately undercut the security of Poland, the Czech Republican, and Great Britain so that he could reach an agreement with Russia regarding nuclear weapons. Obama’s foreign policy was so solicitous of foreign adversaries that more than a few observers noted that, under Obama, it is better to be an enemy of the United States than a friend.
As a reminder, Joe Biden was part of the Obama Administration, and DeSantis just criticized Biden for doing “too much” in Ukraine. No one tell Donald Trump’s Campaign about this book.
Charlie Sykes made a good point about DeSantis a few months back, which is that a lot of DeSantis’s nuttier moves aren’t really meant to be solid policy positions as much as they are a wink and a nod to social conservatives that he will be their guy. The reasoning is that while DeSantis doesn’t really support things like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill or book bans or attacking Disney for supporting LGBTQ causes, he will say those things in order to show that he can “be that guy” once he is in power. He is basically saying, “I can be a more efficient version of the most socially conservative aspects of Trumpism.”
Lately DeSantis has been leaning into this pretty hard. Although it started with legally punishing Disney and the Tampa Bay Rays, it has moved into other territory that some argue is limiting free speech. His most recent move was punishing a hotel for hosting a drag show. Seriously.
You probably know how this is going to play out, but here is 2011 DeSantis talking about free speech:
The approach to the Constitution articulated by progressives in the age of Obama confounds its basic purpose. The Constitution demarcates limitations on government’s power, including specific protections for certain natural rights like the freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because the Founders presupposed that certain public views, passions and mores will change over time, and they wanted a written constitution to serve as an anchor for a changing society. Free speech might not always be popular, so we need a Constitution to stand as an enduring roadblock against popular passions that might undermine it, as well as other, God-given rights upon which no government can properly infringe. […] Those citizens who invoke the nation’s first principles do not consider departed from the Constitution by the ruling class to be “progress.” Instead, they see the principles underlying the Constitution as representing enduring, time-tested truths about politics, government, and liberty. And they refuse to indulge those politicians who advocate interpretations of the Constitution that are insusceptible of principled application and that convert the limited Constitution into what James Madison called “unlimited government.”
This is all from the guy who raised Disney’s taxes because they said they like gay people.
This all brings me to the question asked in the headline: Is DeSantis just going to flame out the same way that other “favorites” did like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, etc.? I don’t know what’s going to happen in the GOP primary, but here is DeSantis’s fundamental problem: Because the GOP does not have any coherent ideology or beliefs outside of what plays well on Fox News, he will be vulnerable to any attack pointing out how none of his policies are enacted in good faith. His only argument for himself is, “I can be a better version of Donald Trump.” But if that’s his argument, why would anyone take the imitation crab over the real thing?
DeSantis flat out is not a true believer in what he’s doing; he just thinks it will get him through the primary. In his defense, this describes most of the conservative movement right now, so he is just following their lead. Recently, DeSantis has been openly touting his “anti-Woke” record and declared that Florida was the place where “woke goes to die.” In an amazing viral moment this week, a conservative author who literally wrote a book on “wokeness” could not define it:1
Side note: This may also be a pretty weak electoral strategy because polls show a majority of Americans view the term positively.
Shondark’s viral moment illustrates a lot, but at its core it shows that conservative ideology is mostly dead and clinging to vague arguments they think Fox News viewers will tune in for. Like DeSantis himself, barely anyone operating as a conservative pundit nowadays is actually a “true believer.”
In reality, the only “true believer” running is Trump. For all of his lies, his supporters see him as the most genuine Republican because a lot of the time, Trump is just on a stage saying whatever wacky thing he believes. Is Trump faking a lot of it too? Sure, but he has a natural charisma that DeSantis and others lack. For one, DeSantis is just a weirdo, as evidenced by this recent Daily Beast piece:
The chatter over DeSantis’ public engagement has also surfaced past unflattering stories about his social skills—particularly, his propensity to devour food during meetings.
“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “always like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.”
The piece goes on to say that DeSantis has problems reading social cues…in other words, one of the most basic things you need to be a successful candidate. Could DeSantis beat Trump? Sure, but given that he is more of a weathervane as opposed to Trump, whose farts can start hurricanes, count me skeptical. What I think we’re seeing play out is that if your entire selling point is that the GOP can deploy “Trumpism without Trump,” it makes no sense as an argument when the originator of your “ism” is still hanging around.
I will close by saying that when it comes to Trump vs. DeSantis, I don’t think it is close: I am 100% rooting for a DeSantis win because Trump is simply not qualified to be President and I’m not even sure America would survive another one of his runs in the White House (and I don’t even know if he’d leave). DeSantis will do things I don’t like and I wouldn’t vote for him, but you don’t have to worry about America collapsing if he becomes President. And I would still expect him to lose comfortably to Joe Biden. See you all next week.
Should-Reads:
More on being “woke” by Phil Bump.
Gabriel Mayor has a good piece on the Dominion case against Fox News. Short summary: It’s a good case but not a guaranteed win.
Surprise: For all the nuttiness two weeks ago about the lab leak, a new study has again linked it to the wet market.
Shondark is still in recovery:
