What Made DeSantis a Star in the First Place

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

 

Invited to give his first impressions of Governor DeSantis’s interview with Jake Tapper yesterday afternoon, Bakari Sellers conceded that DeSantis had “looked decently presidential.” “He started to give the vibe,” Sellers adjudged on CNN, “that he could be president of the United States.”

 

This was not an endorsement — or anything close to one. Sellers is a pro-choice Democrat who served for eight years in South Carolina’s House of Representatives. He does not like Ron DeSantis or his agenda, and he does not believe that DeSantis is going to win the nomination. As if to make this clear, Sellers waited less than an hour after he had offered his initial verdict to add a bunch of caveats. “Ron DeSantis,” he proposed, “is just not that talented.” “When voters meet him,” he concluded, “they reject him when they meet him.”

 

On the face of it, only one of these characterizations can be correct. If, indeed, Ron DeSantis is “not that talented,” then he will likely not be president of the United States. To get to the White House, one needs to inspire voters, and if, in fact, voters “reject him when they meet him” — despite his seeming “decently presidential” — then DeSantis will stall out disastrously. What could account for this schizophrenia?

 

The answer, I would venture, is that Sellers was talking about two different DeSantis campaigns within the same segment. His praise was directed at the DeSantis that showed up in yesterday’s interview; his criticism was directed at the DeSantis that predated it. For a while now, America’s election analysts have been criticizing the DeSantis campaign for its insularity, and it turns out that they may have been right. In politics, context matters a great deal. Just as presidents can look more presidential simply by standing in front of a podium bearing the presidential seal or by walking down the steps of Air Force One, so presidential candidates can look more credible when set against a familiar backdrop. CNN is a familiar backdrop for presidents. DeSantis did well when set against CNN’s backdrop. Ergo, DeSantis looks presidential.

 

Partly, this is aesthetic. For better or for worse, mainstream institutions confer legitimacy on politicians in voters’ minds. Be it an appearance at an SEC game or a photograph on the front of the New York Times or an appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, there is a great deal of power in the connection of the familiar to the new. But there are also substantive benefits to leaving one’s comfort zone that, thus far, the DeSantis campaign has ignored. Inevitably, mainstream interviewers provoke different answers than will friendly or niche interlocutors. Many of Jake Tapper’s questions yesterday were on topics that are intrinsically related to the presidency: the armed forces, the direction of American foreign policy, the future of Taiwan, the war in Ukraine, federal abortion law, and so on. Why did DeSantis get to explain that “the Asia-Pacific really needs to be to our generation what Europe was to the post–World War II generation”? I’ll tell you: Because he was asked the sort of question that invited him to give that answer.

 

This matters. Providing that he can stay in the race, DeSantis has a gauntlet ahead of him — a gauntlet that, at every stage of the process, will involve questions he dislikes and outlets he disfavors. In the coming months, he will have to explain himself repeatedly to the press, navigate debates against the other Republican aspirants, and survive challenges both real and contrived. If, contra Bakari Sellers, DeSantis is, in fact, a “talented candidate,” he will improve his skills along the way by practicing as he goes. If he has insufficient talent, he won’t make it. In either case, he will discover that it is impossible to narrowcast one’s way to the Oval Office.

 

Which is to say that DeSantis’s takeaway ought to be more, more, more. At some point in the last couple of years, either he or his team seem to have forgotten that it was the viral videos of him arguing with the press, and not his more recent decision to ignore all but the friendliest avenues, that made him a national star in the first instance. The most effective Republican candidates are those who find the sweet spot between eloquence and belligerence, and who thereby manage to use the press both as a mass-broadcast system and as a political foil. In his interview with Jake Tapper yesterday, DeSantis struck a solid balance: When it suited him, he explained himself politely and at length; when he needed to, he rejected the premises with which he disagreed and reminded his audience that the media don’t actually like him very much. If, by some miracle, he is able to dig himself out of the hole that Donald Trump has dug for him, it will be by repeating this trick over and over — until the public says, to a man, “Oh I know that guy, he looks decently presidential.”