By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
All engaging dramas need a fool for the whetstone,
and so, in its infinite jest, Nature has sent America the gift of Nicole
“Nikki” Fried, the most inadequate, embarrassing, and downright befuddling
political candidate the great state of Florida has seen in a long while.
Fried’s gubernatorial-campaign slogan declares that she
represents “Something New,” and about that much she is correct. In the last
month alone, Fried has compared sitting governor Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler
and a Communist dictator; she has implied that the northern part of the state
is an extended trailer park, of the sort that will be easily swayed by
suggestive selfies; and she has rewritten the story of the 2018 gubernatorial
election to make herself its hero. Were he to have proffered Fried some
professional advice, Walter Mitty himself might have urged her to calm
down.
Quite why Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner,
wishes to be in politics remains as unclear now as it was in 2018. She has no
policy expertise, she has an unfortunate predilection for conspiracy theorists, and, beyond her vague insistence that
she would be better at the job than DeSantis, she is able to point to no
personal achievements or qualities that might recommend her to the post. In
this great big world of ours, the only civic issue that truly seems
to rile Fried up is the one that she worked on before she was elected to public office:
the legalization and dissemination of marijuana. Beyond that, it’s all sound
and fury, signifying nothing.
As Fried’s fundraising fortunes have declined, that fury has increased. To the presumable
astonishment of the many exiles and refugees in Miami and beyond, Fried has
begun bastardizing Solzhenitsyn in her criticisms of Governor DeSantis. In May,
Fried likened DeSantis to “the leader of a communist
country,” and contended that
“Florida isn’t a free state.” In January, she submitted that
“DeSantis is doing everything he can to become a dictator,” before quipping
that “he’s already half of that word there” and publishing a photo of the
governor in front of a sack of potatoes. Last week, in a fit of pique, she
went all the way. “I’m a student of history, too. I saw the rise
of Hitler,” she said on the Florida Roundup podcast. “Are you
comparing DeSantis to Hitler?” her interlocutor asked. “In a lot of ways, yes,”
she replied.
Expanding upon her case, Fried explained with a straight
face that she is alarmed by DeSantis’s plan to make Florida the 23rd U.S. state
with a civilian state guard: The governor may say that he
wishes to use such a body to improve the state’s hurricane-response
capabilities, she claimed, but he really wants to use it to
“make fear and to instill that, to blame people for what is happening in their
lives, blaming certain parts of our society and culture, and that’s exactly
what Hitler did to the Jews back during World War II.”
Naturally.
On Sunday, Fried repeated this
charge, describing DeSantis as “a danger to our state, our country, and yes,
the world.” For this, Fried earned a rare rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League of Florida,
which reminded the candidate that “while public officials may have
disagreements over policies, comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazism are
inappropriate, offensive, and trivialize this unique tragedy in human history.”
At times, Fried gives off the impression that her
conception of the state in which she lives has been gleaned entirely from
second-rate cartoons. In December, she
boasted that her campaign was not just going “to dominate Ron DeSantis
in South Florida,” but would also do “just fine in North Florida, too.” In
support of this contention, Fried published a photograph of herself standing in
front of a pick-up truck wearing a white tank top and a red, white, and blue
Budweiser hat. Presumably, the photographs of her wrestling alligators,
shot-gunning beers, and shooting holes in speed-limit signs failed to come out
as she had hoped.
Fried has made a habit of overstating her electoral
appeal. “DeSantis didn’t crack 50 percent in 2018,” she exclaimed last
week. “We did. And we’ll do it again.” In the narrowest sense, she was correct:
She won her current office with 50.04 percent of the vote, and DeSantis won his
with 49.6 percent of the vote. But the context she omitted renders the claim
meaningless: Unlike Fried — who had only one opponent, and was thus guaranteed
to hit 50 percent if she won — DeSantis ran in a four-way race, and while that
four-way race was indeed close, DeSantis’s margin of victory (.4 percentage
points) was still five times the size of Fried’s (.08
percentage points).
Next time? Next time, it won’t be so close.
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