Dem
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GOP
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Maybe we should have saved this for "This Week in Schadenfreude," but since just about every newspaper and TV Website in the world was running this as the top story yesterday evening, we had to go with it today. Sorry, (Z).
For example:
As far as we can tell, the only outlet that didn't have the story was the East Cupcake Junior High School Morning Herald. Apparently, there is an emerging scandal there involving forged hall passes, which is obviously big, big news.
Maybe it should have been obvious this was coming, but 18 hours before the bombshell went off, the Tampa Bay Times led with a story headlined Dead man walking? DeSantis continues presidential bid in New Hampshire. Did we ever mention that in politics, 18 hours is a long time?
And the winner of the Best headline goes to ... The Huffington Post.
Where to begin? Let's start with the beer test. It is well known that the candidate everyone wants to have a beer with tends to win. George H.W. Bush? Nah, Bill Clinton was a rascal, but an endearing rascal. Al Gore? Nah, he'd lecture you about global warming. Mitt Romney? Nah, he'd give you binders full of reasons why he would be a great president. Barack Obama? Sure, he would tell you a joke. Hillary? Too uptight for many people. But when it comes to uptight, HRC is an amateur compared to DeSantis. He hates people, campaigning, and especially retail politics, and it shows. Instantly. We're not even sure he wanted to run, but his wife, Lady Macbeth, sure wanted him to.
There are politicians who appear rigid in public but are said to be warm and friendly in person. Hillary Clinton is reported to be like that. Marc Stipanovich, a Florida lobbyist and strategist, said: "I'd rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis." Reporter Nicholas Nehamas wrote of DeSantis: "Even supporters acknowledge that he is not a natural orator, and on the stump he sometimes calls himself an 'energetic executive' in a neutral monotone."
In addition to being likeable only when compared to Vivek Ramaswamy, DeSantis has terrible political instincts. Say what you may about Donald Trump, but he has incredible political instincts. He knew there were people out there who wanted something very different from the 17 or 18 other folks in the 2016 Republican primary and he was right.
Further, DeSantis' timing was off. After the near-drubbing the Republicans took in Nov. 2022, mostly because Trump endorsed folks with serious "candidate quality" problems, DeSantis should have jumped in back in January as the white knight, while Trump was reeling. He waited until May. Horrible decision. At first, people were curious about the new kid in town, but that didn't last long. Look what happened:
In late January 2023, DeSantis was 2-3 points behind Trump. That was the moment to jump in. The media frenzy would have been spectacular, especially if DeSantis' message was: "We need a winner, not a big fat washed-up loser like Trump." Instead, when he finally got in, he did that weird online launch, and then ran to the right of Trump. All he talked about was how he slew the wokebeast in Florida. Nobody had a clue what he was talking about or why. And when he explained how he put Disney in its place, people were thinking how their kids or grandkids read every new issue of Donald Duck 10 times and love it. And many of them had fond memories of wonderful visits to Disneyland or Disney World with their kids. And DeSantis hates, hates, hates the company that their kids love, love, love so much? What's wrong with him? The Governor guessed very, very wrong what it was that the MAGA crowd loves about their Dear Leader, and he also overestimated the extent to which they were looking for a new horse. Chris Christie put it this way: "If you present yourself as New Coke, and Coke's still on the shelves, they are going to buy Coke, not New Coke."
DeSantis had more money than Uncle Scrooge, even though he had to funnel it through a super PAC that his cronies controlled. They wasted most of it due to infighting among various factions. If he couldn't even run a campaign that had north of $80 million on day 1, how could he run a very large and complex country? Surely he did some polling to find out what people thought of him. Most candidates would have taken that feedback and noticed that something was radically wrong and it was time for a serious reboot. Not DeSantis. He doubled down on everything he was doing wrong. Even if he didn't believe the polls he surely conducted, he must have noticed that his billionaire donors, like Ken Griffin and Robert Bigelow, soured on him early on. That might have been a clue something was amiss. If someone had asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) what the problem was, he would surely have said, in his inimitable way, "Candidate quality."
In the end, it surely was money, or the lack thereof, that brought an end to DeSantis '24. When he cut bait in New Hampshire with a week to go, that was plausibly a tactical maneuver. But cutting bait in New Hampshire, and THEN pushing eject on the whole campaign less than a week later? Clearly, he just did not have the resources to keep going, even for a few more weeks in hopes of a miracle.
On the way out the door, DeSantis endorsed Trump and said that the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm... OK, he didn't say that literally, but said he didn't want the job. Not that he has a chance in a billion of being offered it. Trump would probably take Hillary Clinton on the ticket before he would take DeSantis. Now Ron will go back to Florida as an immensely weakened lame duck and have to deal with a state legislature that will do what it wants, not what he wants. Maybe he will dream of 2028. Good luck with that. The Republican Party has plenty of politicians people actually like, starting with Govs. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Chris Sununu (R-NH), and Glenn Youngkin (R-VA). If DeSantis thinks he's going to get any traction after this miserable performance, he will be in for a rude awakening. The other candidates will point out over and over that he dropped out before the first primary because he was polling at 6% there, and not much better in Nevada and South Carolina. Good bye, Ron. We hardly knew ya. And we won't miss you at all. Give our love to Casey. (V)