By Charles
C. W. Cooke
Monday,
August 28, 2023
In the
space of a single week, fate has delivered to Republican primary voters three
stark reminders of what elections are supposed to be about. Ten days ago, the
governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was sauntering around Iowa and New
Hampshire, shaking hands and making promises while his home state sat on
autopilot. Today, he has his hand on the tiller once again. A racially
motivated spree-killing in Jacksonville has put DeSantis’s leadership skills —
and political choices — on display. An uptick in Covid-19 cases has threatened
to reignite the debates over masking that made DeSantis famous in the first
place. And, to top it all off, a hurricane is bearing down on Florida’s west coast. In
the press, these developments have been cast as potential “distractions” from
DeSantis’s participation in the primary. In reality, they are the opposite:
This, not the horse race, is what an interested electorate ought to be
watching.
Historically,
Republicans have preferred to elevate executives, rather than legislators, to
the presidency. As a matter of fact, every Republican president in the last 100
years has had some form of executive experience — whether that experience came
from his having been a governor (Coolidge, Reagan, Bush II), a vice president
(Coolidge, Nixon, Bush I, Ford), a military leader (Eisenhower), or a
businessman (Hoover, Trump). Why? One potential answer is that voters find it
easier to evaluate such figures than to elevate their counterparts in Congress.
Governors represent the state-level equivalents of the president. Vice
presidents and businessmen are tied to an executive record. Military leaders
are unable to escape their decisions. When compared to legislators, this
renders them more capable of answering the practical questions that voters
inevitably have: “How will he use the power he has been granted?”; “Is he
capable of leading a large team?”; “Does he work well with a legislature?” and
so forth.
Unlike
in 2016, this year’s Republican field is almost exclusively filled with
executives. Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Doug Burgum, Asa Hutchinson,
and Chris Christie have all been governors. Donald Trump has been president.
Mike Pence has been vice president. Francis Suarez is a mayor. Vivek Ramaswamy
and Perry Johnson are businessmen. Only Will Hurd (former representative), Tim
Scott (U.S. senator), and Larry Elder (radio host) lack some form of executive
experience. This has changed the dynamic — or, at least, it ought to have. In
addition to what they would do, the vast majority of the
candidates on the stage are able to relate what they did or
are currently doing. This time around, the game is a lot less
theoretical.
Which
brings us back to Ron DeSantis, and to the three unpleasant challenges that
have fallen suddenly into his path. Naturally, one wishes that we lived in a
world without disease, hatred, natural disasters, and other equally harrowing
problems. But, alas, we do not. Whoever wins the presidency next year will be
obliged to face a set of obstacles that, at present, we are unable to predict.
Whether that person is up to the challenge and whether he is capable of
responding in a manner that the electorate finds acceptable are, in my
estimation, the only crucial questions at hand. Debates are nice; smiling is
welcome; kissing babies is all well and good. But the audition is for the role
of executive, not for the role of best friend. Our current president is unable
to tie his shoes. The next one should be made of sterner stuff.
Ahead of
debates or interviews or appearances at the state fair, political pundits like
to pen columns telling spectators “What to Look For.” Usually, this is all
fluff and nonsense — the elevation of the superficial over the concrete. Here,
though, it really matters. Here, the performance and the role are intertwined.
That being so, I shall depart from my usual reticence in this area and
recommend that Republican voters ask the following questions when evaluating
the next two weeks of DeSantis’s governorship: (1) “Did he fulfill the most
essential duty of a governor of Florida — the management
of hurricanes —
well, and if so, what does that tell us about how he would fulfill the most
essential duties of the presidency?” (2) “Did he deal with the racially
motivated murders in Jacksonville in an appropriate manner? Did he acknowledge
that they were a hateful act, carried out in a country with a tragic past? Did
he show up in places where he is not popular? And, just as important, did he
reject the false premises presented by the media and his opportunistic
opponents, and rebuff the inevitable attempts to parlay the crime into policy
changes he opposes?” (3) “Did he stand firm against the
resuscitation of
the illiberal anti-Covid measures he disdains?”
If the
answers to these questions are satisfactory, DeSantis’s constituency deserves
to grow. If they are not, he deserves to drop precipitously down the list of
options. Amid a sea of artifice and vacuity, Republican voters have been
presented with an unforeseen natural experiment. If they are serious about
their task, they’ll turn off cable news, ignore the reams of nonsense that are
being generated online, and participate in it with vim.
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