The Question for DeSantis

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, September 16, 2022

 

At the National Conservatism Conference that met in Miami earlier this week, there was no doubt about the star player. The intellectuals, journalists, and policy entrepreneurs at this conference overwhelmingly wanted one man as their champion going forward: Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

 

DeSantis was introduced to the crowd in grand terms. There were 50 governors and two presidents who faced the Covid test, it was said. Only one passed: our man Ron. The implication was obvious. While Donald Trump continues to sulk and stew over his 2020 election loss — so unfair! — Ron DeSantis is standing up as the leader of the opposition in Biden’s America.

 

His speech was a version of the one he’s been giving all year — Florida is a model for America — and he delivered it with conviction.

 

The message has two parts. The first is: “We rejected the elites.” On Covid in particular, DeSantis emphasized that his role as a statesman wasn’t to accede to whatever public-health experts said, but to harmonize the various interests and values of the entire society he governed. He thundered:

 

Not only were they wrong about schools, the elites were wrong about lockdowns, they were wrong about epidemiological models and hospitalization models, they were wrong about forced masking, they were wrong when they rejected the evidence about natural immunity, they were wrong about the efficacy of mRNA vaccines.

 

The second half of DeSantis’s message was, understandably: “And Florida is thriving!” Public-school achievement is ahead of other states. Private schools are flourishing. Florida is receiving loads of in-migration from what DeSantis sees as a failing blue-state model. Florida’s economy recovered from the pandemic, while other states lagged. It received almost a pandemic bonus as Americans and foreigners chose Florida as a vacation spot, knowing that they wouldn’t be required to wear masks or to share their medical history with every busboy and barkeep. Florida’s revenues are surging.

 

DeSantis used variations of the same message and applied them generously to Florida’s approach to education policy, to criminal-justice issues, and even to culture-war issues. Ron DeSantis is willing to take the criticism, become the focus of the mainstream media’s Eye-of-Sauron-like attention, and deliver on what he sees as the best interest of his state. And the state is booming. There are construction cranes, seemingly everywhere. Neighborhoods are expanding. Property values are going up.

 

And I was sitting there — variously clapping and standing and clapping, and hoping for the day when DeSantis becomes the nominee. Friends texted me from the other tables. “He’s solid!” Or “He’s on fire!”

 

True. And this is the perfect message for a reelection campaign in Florida: We’re doing great! How about four more years of that? If he’s reelected in November, talk will immediately shift to whether he should declare his candidacy for the presidency.

 

But America is not Florida. In Florida, DeSantis’s message is that he enforced the law, did things that were popular with the electorate if not the press, and then got out of the way while Floridians, old and new, created these good days for themselves.

 

But the last Republican nominee for president had a message for places that do not have Florida’s advantages, nor its prospects. Florida in some ways succeeds because so much of America is underperforming. Not just blue states such as California, where the middle class is being pushed out. But states that voted for Trump in 2016, such as Michigan. Or giant, deep-red regions such as upstate New York.

 

A President Ron DeSantis can’t zero out state income taxes and make palm trees grow in western Massachusetts. Voters in 2016’s “Brexit States” — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin — have consistently supported candidates who promised to revise the American economic model, to restrain the economic forces they believed were making their states and communities worse places to live. Obama denounced NAFTA and won. Trump promised to rewrite all trade deals and not to sign a new trade deal with Pacific nations, while his opponent said America was already great; Trump won.

 

What is the DeSantis message about the American economic model? Does he believe in re-shoring industry? Does he think the way all those NatCons cheering him think?