By Abe Greenwald
Friday, May 19, 2023
Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis is reportedly set to announce his candidacy for president
next week. He’s currently trailing Donald Trump by 36.1 percent
in RealClearPolitics polling averages, and his setbacks and challenges have
been widely discussed. But beyond questions about his heavy-handed policy or
supposedly chilly demeanor, he faces a more peculiar problem: The man hasn’t
even announced yet and Americans may already be a little sick of him. He’s
heading into his campaign announcement overexposed.
A
candidate can only enter a race once, so he should do it on his own terms. But
whatever the date of DeSantis’s official announcement, that option has been
foreclosed to him. He effectively entered the race after his midterm landslide
last November. That’s when he became The Only Republican Who Can Beat Trump.
This scared the daylights out of liberals because Trump, they feared, was The
Only Man Who Could Lose To Joe Biden. So DeSantis began to draw obsessive
coverage from a hostile media that put him in the race on their terms.
And the
media’s terms are no secret. DeSantis is a threat to the country because he’s a
capable far-right Republican who has successfully rolled back progressive
initiatives in his home state. And he’s even scarier than Trump because he’s an
authoritarian with talent and skill, someone who goes beyond bluster and bends
government to his will.
So the
press covered DeSantis with a flurry of extravagant misnomers. The “don’t say
gay” bill has nothing to do with saying “gay.” His effort to “erase black
history,” in fact, restores black history to its prominence in African-American
studies. His “book banning” doesn’t empty library shelves of classic works; it
removes blatant pornography from children’s schools. These efforts at negative
framing worked to some extent in creating a DeSantis avatar for the liberal
public to fear.
But
that’s not all they did. They set off DeSantis fatigue, even (or especially)
among conservatives. For Republican voters, he became the guy you keep hearing
about who never shows up—not even to push back on the press
mischaracterizations. The stories just lingered. And then his war on Disney,
which was once praised by activist right wingers as a triumph for the anti-woke
counter-offensive, went bad on him, further blurring the portrait of him as a
can-do culture-war general. So while it was exciting, a few months back, for
conservatives to speculate about what DeSantis was up to and when he’d jump in
the race, that all went stale. Contra the old showbiz advice, he left them
wanting less.
Meanwhile,
Donald Trump—the guy everyone was supposed to be sick
of—couldn’t stop making compelling news. Headline by headline, he wrested back
control of the political spotlight. He went to East Palestine, Ohio, and
befriended the community the Biden administration ignored. He turned his
indictment and arrest in New York City into a battle-cry moment against the
political weaponization of the justice system (DeSantis, like every other
Republican, took his side). He unexpectedly appeared in a successful town hall
on CNN that gave liberals nightmares about being trapped in 2016 all over
again. And he beat up on DeSantis the whole time. In speeches, social-media
posts, and by extension in super-PAC ads. These attacks also went unanswered by
DeSantis.
Perhaps
the answers start coming next week.
There’s
a line of strategic thinking whereby its good for a candidate to take his big
hits early in a campaign so that he has time to fight back and put the damage
behind him. This applies to DeSantis insofar as he can now push back on the
lies about and criticisms of policies. But he’s got a tougher problem on his
hands. His candidacy lost a good deal of its significance, its moment, before
it actually began. If he can fix that, he will demonstrate that he is indeed a
man his enemies should fear.
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