DeSantis Is Better Off Being Banal Than Being Based

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 25, 2023

 

It should not be difficult for even Ron DeSantis’s core supporters to admit that the governor’s presidential-campaign launch was “very online.” It was literally exclusive to an online platform — a platform that imploded at the most theatrically inopportune moment.

 

Political observers invested in DeSantis’s failure are tripping over themselves to make that aurally amateurish and technically raw moment into a metaphor for a campaign adrift. That effort will be complicated by the lack of visuals associated with the technological hiccups that marred the launch. The oddness of the whole affair spared DeSantis from being immortalized, bug-eyed and bewildered, amid total technological meltdown.

 

It’s not surprising that a political class full of Twitter obsessives is obsessing over Twitter. But it wasn’t just the glitchy outset of the governor’s presidential bid that disfigured his launch. Nor was the campaign’s decision to reduce the stature of its own candidate down to a lowly podcast guest and cable-news panelist the most unnerving aspect of the governor’s downbeat christening. Rather, it was the substance DeSantis brought to the table that should concern his supporters.

 

The DeSantis campaign’s theory of the case seems to rest on the idea that the governor can out-compete Donald Trump in a contest of theory. Alongside investor David Sacks and entrepreneur Elon Musk, DeSantis spoke lucidly, at length, and in impressive detail about niche minutiae — a characterization that will no doubt offend those who are themselves consumed by niche minutiae.

 

DeSantis took questions from friends about his reforms aimed at stripping the divisive ideological excesses of critical race theory from state-funded college syllabi. But his focus was more on ideology than the nuts-and-bolts of piercing academia’s bubble. He vowed to “protect” Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general from “central planners” who view virtual currency as a threat, even though only about one out of five Americans have ever owned or traded any cryptocurrency. He talked about inflation and restoring price stability within the context of the Federal Reserve and its odious independence from the political process, rather than explaining how the political process he is seeking to lead contributed to inflation. From “woke mind virus” to “de-banking” to the “corporatist” GOP, he peppered his appearance with the buzzy argot of the narrow, self-selected “Very Online” right.

 

The discussion didn’t take place entirely in the altitudes at which Musk’s Starlink satellites orbit, but too much of it did. Afterward, DeSantis descended back down to Earth to join former representative Trey Gowdy for a more conventional interview on Fox News. That exchange suffered less from chronic overthinking, but not much less.

 

When he was asked how a hypothetical President DeSantis would approach the foremost geopolitical challenge of our time — a conventional, large-scale, mechanized war on the European continent — the governor again pivoted to theory. He complained that our “woke military” has “become politicized,” and is more concerned about “gender ideology” and “global warming” than winning wars. The governor isn’t wrong, but he was evading the question he’d been asked in a retreat to more obscure terrain.

 

All this rarefied talk is not where DeSantis’s political power comes from. It’s not where any political power comes from, in fact. The governor appears to know that by virtue of how often he obliquely referenced his capacity for “follow through” and the legislative accomplishments he has secured, without dwelling too much on the nitty-gritty of those accomplishments or how he secured them. Those are tangible victories, and tangibility matters, as the House GOP has shown in this Congress.

 

Recently my former boss, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, posited a compelling theory of why House Republicans’ narrow, fractious majority has become the driving force in Washington: It’s not because of its most vocal members’ penchant for saying provocative things into microphones; it’s because the majority party has delivered legislation to which Democrats are obliged to respond.

 

The conference rallied together to pass bills that compelled Democrats to amend Washington, D.C.’s lax crime statutes. It’s put the White House on the defensive on border security, faddish left-wing investment vehicles, and federal spending. Why? Because the legislation it can pass is real. The roll-call votes it can force are real. The electoral victories that gave it control of the lower chamber were real.

 

DeSantis himself seems aware of this immutable dynamic, but his campaign staffers haven’t yet shown a similar awareness. They appear to be operating under the assumption that their primary strategy and their general-election strategy must be entirely distinct. That is the spell under which Democratic presidential aspirants fell in 2020, when all of them save one competed for the votes of the most aggrieved and radical members of the progressive base, clearing the field for the candidate who campaigned in the primary and the general as a pliant problem-solver. Inversely, the strategists insisted in 2016 that Donald Trump could not beat Hillary Clinton if he brought the affect and policy prescriptions he’d campaigned on in the primary to the general election. That, too, was a flawed assumption.

 

Maybe the real DeSantis is the guy who fixates on the “elite cabals” in charge of America’s central banking and the solvency of Dogecoin over issues like war and peace, poverty and prosperity. But he doesn’t seem like that guy, and the result is that he comes off as inauthentic. The launch should be a wake-up call. It’s time to go back to basics. There was never anything wrong with being surrounded by an adoring crowd and a loving family to deliver a speech about how, through his leadership, DeSantis has made life in Florida better using conventional political mechanisms. That doesn’t “disrupt” anything, sure. But being “disruptive” is overrated.

 

Joe Biden promised to satisfy the public’s desire for a return to normalcy and failed to deliver. So that demand persists among voters, and DeSantis should be pledging to meet it. He needs the confidence to avoid allowing his biggest fans to talk him out of his better instincts.