By
Philip Klein
Friday,
August 25, 2023
Florida governor
Ron DeSantis’s greatest political success was the product of taking a risk.
After initially going along with the “flatten the curve” Covid strategy
advocated by Anthony Fauci and the Trump administration, DeSantis in late April
2020 announced that his state would begin to reopen. After about six weeks of
doing the politically safe thing and deferring to public-health officials, he
made the basic calculation that the benefits of continued lockdowns were
negligible at best, while the policies’ destructive effects on businesses and
children were very real.
We knew
very little about Covid at the time, and his actions theoretically could have
led to an explosion in new cases and deaths, which not only would have weighed
on his conscience but would have ended his political career. But he took a
gamble, and it paid off — both for residents of his state and for his political
prospects. It catapulted him into position as the most formidable rival to
Donald Trump and as the clear front-runner in a race without Trump.
While
DeSantis talks a great deal about his Covid success story, he seems not to have
internalized the real lessons of it. Instead, he is running a campaign — to
borrow a phrase popularized among Covid scolds — with an abundance of caution.
DeSantis
has bought into the idea that he has to be the unity candidate: somebody who
can win over a portion of voters who like Trump while still remaining palatable
to those Republicans who hate Trump. While this seems logical, the problem with
running a campaign based on the idea of trying to satisfy both sides is that it
can backfire by alienating everybody. This is especially true when running
against candidates who have no qualms about alienating particular segments of
the party.
This
problem was on perfect display in the first Republican presidential debate.
Asked for a show of hands as to whether they would still support Trump if he
were convicted, Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot right up, while DeSantis looked
around before half-raising his hand. He then tried to avoid answering whether he
believed that Mike Pence did the right thing on January 6 by presiding over the
counting of electoral votes, before begrudgingly saying, “Mike did his duty. I’ve
got no beef with him.”
Another
show-of-hands question was on whether the candidates would oppose future
Ukraine aid. Once again, Ramaswamy’s hand shot up, and he took a clear position
in favor of cutting off aid, while DeSantis’s hand went up partially, and he
spoke about how he would demand that Europe kick in more. The DeSantis
calculation was obvious — he doesn’t want to be seen as an establishment
“forever war” Republican, but he also doesn’t want to come off to hawks as
somebody unacceptably soft on Vladimir Putin. What he ended up with was an
answer unsatisfying to either camp.
Now,
let’s be clear. Ramaswamy is not going to be the Republican nominee, because he
is never going to be able to take on Trump. His answers do not stand up to even
a tiny bit of scrutiny. And he’s no paragon of political courage: He completely
dodged the moderators’ question of whether Pence did the right thing, and when
asked again by National Review’s
John McCormack following the debate, he gave an incomprehensible
answer. But if you
were watching the debate at home and you’re a Republican voter outraged about
the Trump indictments, what you saw was Ramaswamy confidently saying he would
pardon Trump, while DeSantis appeared to equivocate. Even if Ramaswamy
does not actually leap ahead of DeSantis in popularity, as long as he remains
relevant, he is going to absorb a certain number of soft Trump supporters whom
DeSantis can barely afford to lose.
On the
other hand, for those voters who are anti-Trump, it’s Pence and Chris Christie
who are offering greater moral clarity on Trump’s actions after the 2020
election.
Meanwhile,
when DeSantis criticizes Trump, he is always careful to do it from the right —
attacking his embrace of Fauci, his criminal-justice reform, his failure to
build the border wall, and so on. Trump shows no such restraint. He has
attacked DeSantis from the left on entitlement reform, Covid, and abortion —
and his surrogates sided with Vice President Kamala Harris in the debate over
Florida’s African-American-history curriculum. Trump is not calculating whether
certain attacks on DeSantis will backfire. He just stays on offense.
Speaking
of Harris, she is a perfect example of how so-called consensus candidates tend
to fizzle in presidential primaries. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was
a time when insiders saw her as the most likely 2020 nominee. She fulfilled
Democrats’ desire for diversity, and ideologically she carefully positioned
herself where most pundits thought the Democratic electorate was — to the left
of Joe Biden, but to the right of Bernie Sanders. After one strong debate
performance that briefly vaulted her to the position of front-runner, her
mealy-mouthed equivocating statements (particularly on health care) ended up
leading to the collapse of her campaign before Iowa, while two candidates
presenting a clear contrast fought for the nomination.
DeSantis’s
campaign failures to date have been blamed by some analysts on his
unwillingness to criticize Trump, while others argue that he has criticized
Trump too much. But neither narrative gets at the central problem, which is
simply that DeSantis is being too calculating and too cautious.
There
are still over four months to go before actual voting begins, and anybody who
has covered presidential campaigns in early-primary and caucus states knows
that voters don’t start to get serious until a few weeks before casting votes.
But the time is now for DeSantis to start taking risks and saying what he
thinks without worrying about pissing off the right people or the wrong people.
He is way behind a front-runner who will say anything, and the other candidates
are campaigning with nothing to lose. DeSantis does not have the luxury to play
it safe.
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