Ron DeSantis got the worst presidential-campaign press since Barry Goldwater in 1964.
My experience has been that you can never really know a politician unless you meet him before he runs for office. By the time he becomes The Candidate, he makes his way through life as loose and natural as a man in full hazmat gear inching across a minefield.
• I knew Ron DeSantis when he was a hard-charging young lawyer in Jacksonville, Casey when she was a local TV personality. Recently married, they were building careers and planning a family. They were hardworking, smart, clearly more of a team than a couple. What I admired most about them, I remember thinking, was that they were openly ambitious for both themselves and their country. I was thankful that America, tired and troubled as she was, could still produce such people.
• If Ron and Casey had securitized their future prospects in an Initial Public Offering, I would have subscribed for a thousand shares.
• Evelyn Waugh, a sometime contributor to these pages, once said, “Instead of this absurd division into sexes, they ought to class people as static and dynamic.” Ron and Casey DeSantis can be classed as dynamic. They will be back before long, but possibly not before we have begun to appreciate the opportunity we just missed.
• I have watched or participated in more presidential campaigns than you have and, by my reckoning, Ron DeSantis got the worst press since Barry Goldwater in 1964. I give you just two memory-stirring selections from the Goldwater sampler: (1) Democratic media assets persuaded a couple of thousand psychiatrists to sign a full-page newspaper ad stating that, in their professional opinion, Barry was nuts. Not one of the psychiatrists, it turned out, had examined Barry. And (2) the CBS Evening News reported from Bavaria that well-placed German right-wingers — I think you know the people I mean — were meeting to plan how they might most effectively demonstrate their support for Goldwater’s campaign. There was no such meeting. Barry Goldwater’s reputation sustained irreparable damage from the 1964 media attack.
• Historical sidebar. Late in his career, and in the middle of mine, Barry and I were designated as a two-person unit to inspect and report on certain U.S. military installations. We spent many seat-miles together and I got to know him well. He wasn’t nuts and he wasn’t a Nazi. (For one thing, his Jewish father wouldn’t have approved.) Barry was a patriot and a close student of military technology. And he never left home without his fine, German-engineered BS detector. America’s enemies were right to fear him.
• In the DeSantis campaign, the media onslaught seemed to accelerate even after he got out. According to the postmortems, DeSantis had hired the wrong people and taken the wrong advice. He had spent money recklessly and to no positive effect. He had been too soft on Ukraine and too hard on abortion. He had been too unremitting in his opposition to woke culture and too footdragging in his criticism of opponents. He was short, and stocky, not slim like Beto, or sleek like Gavin. He wore the wrong shoes and smiled the wrong smile. If you can believe it, he left grumpy diners uncharmed at truck stops. He was too close to, or too reliant upon, or too bewitched by, or too something-or-other’d by his wife. When he withdrew — unlike Chris or Vivek or Tim or Asa or Doug from North Dakota — Ron’s campaign did not get suspended, or simply come to an end. No, it “collapsed.” From beginning to end, we were told, it had been “embarrassing.” Even “humiliating.” The DeSantis campaign was, in the summary judgment of our media betters, not so much a loss as a “disaster.”
• All of these legacy-media “analyses” were clichés borrowed from an earlier and unrelated paradigm. The DeSantis campaign did not fail. It prepared for an opening that never materialized. It was the only shot DeSantis had, and he took it. And we should be thankful that he did. He might have won had Trump been convicted or hospitalized or impaled on some other exclamation point in his colorful life.
• DeSantis used his time in the spotlight well. He leveraged the platform of a presidential campaign to lay out a full-spectrum conservative agenda. For the first time in this century.
• Back in 2022, the Democrats field-tested their plan to save what was left of their precious, always precious, democracy: To restore and revitalize a sense of political comity among their divided countrymen, the Democrats volunteered to nominate the candidates for both parties. You remember Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, and the rest? The Democrats went all in to nominate the most unelectable Republicans. The media division of the Democratic Party then said, as with a single voice, “That’s cool,” which they might not have said had Republicans launched stealth interventions into Democratic primaries. And then, as soon as the red tide had ebbed, the All Clear was sounded. Comity was restored, decency was returned, the old normal was once again, thank God, the new normal. (I think I have that right. I got it straight from the wondrous Karine Jean-Pierre.)
• I will leave it to my expert colleagues to determine whether the Democrats have now succeeded in nominating Donald Trump for president.