![]() So DeSantis has gone from cunning (which he is) to unlikable (ditto), from someone who has outperformed expectations (that 19-point margin) to someone who cannot possibly meet them. ![]() They are built up, each observer outdoing the breathlessness of the previous ones, until they must be torn down, because the existing story is stale and new adjectives and anecdotes are in order. Those limitations are also the object of current scrutiny and skepticism.Īttention to politicians on the rise and on the make comes in predictable phases. He’s methodical and relentless, and that compensates for his oratory, more yawn-stoking than heart-stirring, and his debating, more bluster than luster. He’s making a list and checking it twice, an anti-Santa of all-purpose antipathy. Covid vaccines? He exhorts his state’s Supreme Court to convene a grand jury to look into incomplete and inaccurate information about them. Abortion? He punishes and publicly shames a pro-choice Tampa-area prosecutor. Public education about systemic racism? He goes to war with the College Board over its proposed Advanced Placement course on African American studies. employees and proposes banning any consideration of “environmental, social and governance” factors in decisions about how and where to invest Florida funds. “Woke” corporate activism? He punishes Disney for standing up for L.G.B.T.Q. Immigration? He sends a planeload of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. What he mostly spends his time doing is peacocking and planting unignorable markers along every fault line in the culture wars. “I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans,” he added. And this month Trump insinuated on social media that when DeSantis was a secondary school teacher decades ago, he behaved inappropriately around female students.ĭeSantis’s response? “I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he told a reporter who asked him about the vague and unsubstantiated allegation. “Meatball Ron” is apparently under consideration. A few months ago, “Ron DeSanctimonious” made its puerile and lavishly syllabic debut. Trump is obviously braced for that, and is intensifying his aspersions accordingly. But many signs suggest that he’s headed there. Of course, there’s no guarantee DeSantis will even run for president. But DeSantis has the very venom that Bush didn’t. It has become popular to make that comparison as well, likening DeSantis to his predecessor in the Florida governor’s mansion. ![]() He’s not Walker: Nate Cohn explained why in The Times early this week, concluding that DeSantis “has a lot more in common with Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan” when they were gearing up for their first presidential bids than with Walker, Kamala Harris or Rick Perry, whose sizzle fizzled fast. I’m rooting hard against DeSantis, a flamboyantly divisive and transcendently smug operator with the chilling grandiosity to cast his political ascent as God’s will and a rapacity for power that’s one of the best arguments against giving it to him.īut the latest wave of commentary underestimates him - and that’s dangerous. It brings me no joy to make those observations. And DeSantis faced a much better-known opponent than Walker had. Walker’s bid to be the Republican nominee in 2016 winked out even before the Iowa caucuses.īut he’d won his second term in Wisconsin in 2014 by less than six percentage points, while DeSantis sailed to re-election in Florida last year by more than 19. The doubters have also theorized that DeSantis could be this presidential election cycle’s Scott Walker, a gleaming governor who can’t make the leap from a local stage to the national one - who dims as the lights grow brighter. Brawling with Trump doesn’t flex DeSantis’s muscle. But where those critics spot possible weakness, I see proven discipline. That’s a fresh sentiment discernible in some recent assessments, as political analysts and journalists marvel at, chew over and second-guess his failure to return Donald Trump’s increasingly ugly jabs. Or at least runs the risk of looking like one.
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