The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after. This thing is on. Some observations on Ron DeSantis.
The Florida governor is definitely running. Every sign is there: donors, a growing and increasingly professional organization, a book that is part memoir, part platform and debuted this week at No. 1 on the New York Times list. A few days ago he gave a big, packed-house speech at the Reagan Library.
He’s come off a landslide 2022 re-election (almost 20 points) in which he won majorities of Hispanics, independents and women. He is 44, governor of a major state that was purple and has gone red, and there is no way (barring the unanticipated) he is not in. I read him as a guy who thinks you get a moment in politics, a magic moment, and when it comes you move because you don’t know if it will ever come again. “They’ll forget me,” 43-year-old John F. Kennedy said when advised to wait and go for the presidency in 1964. No, he’d made a splash at the 1956 convention, 1960 was his shot, move now or never.
Mr. DeSantis is a big dawg, and it isn’t only Donald Trump trying to take him down. A prospective competitor called recently to share his thoughts: “DeSantis is a cheap imitation of Trump, it’s Fox News soundbites and cowboy boots with 2-inch heels.” Others retail the gossip that he’s “on the spectrum.”
I don’t think normal people have more than an impression: a blank face sitting behind a square desk signing bills. Often he is surrounded, sometimes oddly, by grade-school children. You imagine one of the 8-year-olds announcing somberly to the press, “We agwee—we’re too young to hear about gender fwooidity.”
He’s tough, unadorned, and carries a vibe, as I’ve said, that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone. His supporters shrug: “He’s not warm and cuddly.” I don’t think voters are looking for warm and cuddly, but they do want even-keeled—a normal man or woman who’s a leader, who has guts and a vision of where the country needs to go.
As I watched the Reagan Library speech I thought: This candidacy is going to have power. He wasn’t inspired or eloquent but plain-spoken and brisk; his address was workmanlike, from notes, but all together it packed a punch.
Governors, he observes in his book, “The Courage to Be Free,” have to deliver. It’s an executive office: They create a record and you can measure what they did. Legislators merely have to talk and vote on congenial bills—it’s hard to measure their effectiveness: “They are not really required to lead.”
In the library speech he pointed to his achievements: a strong state economy—Florida’s unemployment rate was 3.5% when he took office in 2019, and in December 2022, after the pandemic, it was 2.5%. A good state balance sheet; a generally light, pro-individual-freedom hand on Covid; he got the schools open. His state is one people are moving into, not out of.
He is a culture warrior, but between the lines he suggests he’s also pragmatic, practical and gets things done. This may be his real superpower: When, during Hurricane Ian, the bridge to Pine Island washed away, the state had it up and operating a week later. That wasn’t talk, it was knowing the innards of government and making it deliver.
I don’t think he’s running as Trump without the psychopathology, I think he’s running as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative with populist inflections.
His strategy now: Draw as much from the Trump quadrant as possible, slowly try to leach him of support. One thing about Trump supporters is you win their respect if you speak of things in a “no going back” way. When Mr. Trump, in his 2015 announcement, spoke of illegal immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers, those giving him a hearing didn’t roar because they literally think all illegal immigrants are rapists and drug smugglers. They roared because they knew there was no going back from language like that. It meant he really would try to control the border.
The focus on wokeness is Mr. DeSantis’s illegal immigration. He wants to own the issue in the Republican field and, as the year gets deeper, move on from there.
A political veteran present before and after the library speech found Mr. DeSantis impressive but saw a weakness: “He’s on ‘broadcast’ almost all of the time, not ‘receive.’” He likes to talk. He makes eye contact, there’s back-and-forth. “But my sense is that he’s thinking about what he’s next going to tell you, not what you’re going to ask.” Still, in the end the veteran sensed something electric. “You know that feeling you get when you’re in a room and it’s obvious to every person in that room, from 10 people to 5,000, that ‘No kidding, this guy really could be a president’? He’s got it.”
Mr. DeSantis’s book begins with a pow of undiluted cultural populism. His leadership in Florida has been “a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground.” They are a “ruling class” that controls the federal bureaucracy, big business, corporate media, big tech, the universities. “These elites are ‘progressives’ who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of ‘experts’ who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt.”
It is a brisk book; things are put bluntly. George W. Bush’s foreign policy was “Wilsonianism on steroids.” My favorite part had a Mickey Spillane feel. Assigned as a naval officer to Northeast Florida, he sees a beautiful woman on a golf course. “She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed.” He thought her a college golfer: “She looked the part and had a great swing.” She was a television news reporter, Casey Black. They married three years later.
Two DeSantis question areas:
First, his temperament. Does he connect with voters on the trail? How does he play it when he gets smacked around in debate? On the stage in his 2022 debate with Democrat Charlie Crist he seemed defensive and testy. This when he was on top of the world with a landslide coming. You don’t have to be a happy warrior, but you probably can’t be a morose one.
Second, can he learn to explain his thinking? He tends more to announce decisions than explain how he got there. But in the culture wars especially, you must take time and show your good faith. Can he come down with force and logic when nuts on his own side get out of line? A supporter in the state Legislature this week put out a bill that would mandate bloggers register with the state. It was absurd. More was needed from Mr. DeSantis than a statement that he had nothing to do with it. It was an opportunity to share his thinking—almost a magic moment.
Connected to that, can he explain his own legislation at length, thoughtfully, with context and pertinent, checkable facts? Why let a reasonable and constructive limit on kids and wokeness be slimed as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill?
You’re not stooping when you explain your thinking, you’re spreading.