HOW TO WRITE A RON DeSANTIS PUFF PIECE WITHOUT THE ICKY RON DeSANTIS PART

Right-wingers love Ron DeSantis for his nastiness and cruelty, but how do you promote him to moderate voters who might believe that a politician should have skills other than owning the libs in as sadistic a manner as possible? Since DeSantis (a) has no other skills and (b) has committed himself to lib-owning so fully that it suffuses all aspects of his very unpleasant personality, I guess you have sell him the way Charles Gasparino does in this New York Post column -- by excluding him from the sales pitch entirely.

Gasparino begins with several paragraphs of Biden-is-a-senile-old-coot boilerplate, followed by a swipe at Donald Trump ("another old dude who offers up his own set of personal baggage so large, we don’t have room in this column to describe it"). Then he writes:

And yet there is a ray of hope — sunshine, to be precise — beaming down south in Florida. If you want to see the American experiment flourish, spend a few days down there, particularly in the melting pot known as Miami, as I recently did.

Gasparino continues:

Florida is more than just Disney World and orange groves these days. Big tech, Wall Street, crypto, hospitality and amazing restaurants are the state’s — and city’s — lifeblood.

I like how he throws "hospitality" in there, as if there was no tourism in Florida until DeSantis was inaugurated in 2019. (My parents honeymooned there -- in 1954.)

So are the people who are arriving, many of them immigrants, a lot of them transplanted northerners, all of them seeking opportunity that statists like Joe Biden have been discouraging for decades.

So these immigrants left countries where Joe Biden isn't the head of state and came to the country where he is head of state ... to avoid his policies?

Again, spend some time talking to these strivers as I did. They’re grinders. Not just the brokers and bankers, but the people who work during the day in restaurants, then drive an Uber at night.

That actually sounds pretty hellish. It also sounds exactly like the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants residing in Brooklyn and Queens.

My cabdriver told me how he’s a first-generation Cuban American. His family came to Miami in the 1970s.

And he's still just a cabdriver? Even though the streets are paved with gold in Florida?

The now-glitzy South Beach area was largely a “dump,” as he put it. No longer, he proudly explained as we passed a booming stretch of restaurants and high-end fashion shops that employ the locals and give them a chance at a better life.

The South Beach revival was well established when I visited in 1997, which would have been a few months after DeSantis graduated from high school. I don't think he gets the credit.

At a restaurant, I was served by a waiter from Italy, who escaped the stifling economy of the southern region known as the “Mezzogiorno.” He left some years ago and by the sound of it, he’s never going back because he can actually make a decent living here without paying off the local Mafia boss.

So now Biden is responsible for poverty and organized crime in Italy? For a doddering old dementia case, he gets around.

I touched base with a friend of mine, a local born in Cuba who came here and made it pretty big as a bond salesman. Before talking business, he gave me a tour of Little Havana. We had lunch of arroz con pollo at the amazing Versailles Restaurant....

Which has been in business since 1971, despite the fact that Florida was an unlivable hellscape until Ron DeSantis became governor in 2019.

... the downtown business district, which back in the 1990s looked like a ghost town in the middle of the day, is bustling with financiers. New construction of luxury high-rises and office buildings is seemingly everywhere.

I hate to admit it, but Gasparino is right. Even the liberal New York Times acknowledges this! Here's a Times story headlined "Downtown Miami in Midst of a Building Boom." (Oh, wait -- it's from 2006.)

Of course, Miami and Florida aren’t utopia; drugs, gangs, fentanyl, illegal immigration, homelessness, they’re all here. So is Florida Man. But people don’t come here for utopia. They come for the chance that Sleepy Joe won’t give them.

Even though Biden is president of all fifty states, including Florida.

DeSantis is completely absent from this puff piece. Maybe that's because the governor was too busy collaborating with newly created right-wing propaganda sites to give an interview even to a Murdoch-media fanboy. Or maybe it's because Gasparino knows that describing DeSantis's actual approach to governing -- or his approach to any kind of human interaction, for that matter -- would alienate the Post's readers, many of whom aren't right-wing ideologues.

I continue to believe that DeSantis would be a strong candidate in 2024 -- Republicans will close ranks around him, the "liberal" media will treat him with kid gloves while bashing Biden, and many low-information swing voters who are dissatisfied with the state of the country will just shrug and say, "Let's give someone new a chance." But he's a profoundly unlikable person, which means his campaign staff -- which includes all of the Murdoch media -- will have to create the DeSantis equivalent of 1968's "new Nixon," someone who's really not that bad a guy once you get to know him. But with DeSantis, that might be impossible. Maybe this is the best they can do.