Monday, April 10, 2023

RON DeSANTIS IS A TERRIBLE LIVE ACT

In a New York Times opinion piece, Sam Adler-Bell argues that Ron DeSantis likes elites too much to put a real dent in Donald Trump's support among the GOP base:
... [DeSantis's] disdain for experts is selective. While deciding how to address the pandemic, Mr. DeSantis collaborated with the Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya (“He’d read all the medical literature — all of it, not just the abstracts,” Dr. Bhattacharya told The New Yorker) and followed the recommendations of a group of epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford who pushed for a swifter reopening. Mr. DeSantis’s preference for their recommendations over those of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t signify a rejection of expertise as such, only an embrace of alternative expertise....

In reality, Mr. DeSantis is not against elites, exactly; he aims merely to replace the current elite (in academia, corporations and government) with a more conservative one, with experts who have not been infected, as Mr. DeSantis likes to say, by “the woke mind virus.” The goal is not to do away with the technocratic oligarchy, but to repopulate it — with people like Ron DeSantis.
Contrast that with the story of how Trump came to focus his 2016 campaign on a promise to build a border wall, as recounted by Stuart Anderson:
In 2014, Trump’s plan to run for president moved into high gear. His political confidant was consultant Roger Stone. “Inside Trump’s circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisers brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message,” writes Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising. “They needed a trick, a mnemonic device. In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked.”

Joshua Green had good access to Trump insiders, including Sam Nunberg, who worked with Stone. “Roger Stone and I came up with the idea of ‘the Wall,’ and we talked to Steve [Bannon] about it,” according to Nunberg. “It was to make sure he [Trump] talked about immigration.”

... “Initially, Trump seemed indifferent to the idea,” writes Green. “But in January 2015, he tried it out at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call put on by David Bossie’s group, Citizens United. ‘One of his pledges was, ‘I will build a Wall,’ and the place just went nuts,’ said Nunberg.
Trump didn't consult with right-wing immigration experts. He consulted with political guys. Anderson writes:
Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg are political consultants. Neither man has claimed expertise in immigration policy....

It should seem strange to base U.S. immigration policy on an idea Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg thought up without any analysis as to whether it represented good policy for the United States. Yet that is what happened....
Political guys gave Trump the idea to talk about the Wall, and then he decided to keep the Wall in his stump speech the same way a stand-up comic would decide to keep a joke in his act: because he tried it out on audiences and it killed.

Today, in the Times, Gail Collins says that Trump arrived at his position on abortion the same way:
Back during his first presidential foray, when he was still speaking to the Times Opinion folk, I remember him telling us how amazed he was to discover you could get a conservative audience wildly excited just by saying something bad about abortion. That is exactly how Trump became anti-choice.
The Dobbs decision and the ban on mifepristone happened because audiences loved it when Trump pledged to ban abortion.

DeSantis is reasonably good at delivering red meat to the base -- he's certainly better than all the other Rpublicans trying to beat Trump. That's not surprising -- some of the experts he consults work at Fox News, which pays a lot of attention to what appeals to the rank-and-file and what doesn't. But DeSantis doesn't like crowds -- remember the bike racks his people imposed between the governor and crowds on his book tour? -- so he's not identifying killer material in the heat of the moment.

Also, there's his obsession with "results." Adler-Bell writes:
During his second inaugural speech in Tallahassee in January, Mr. DeSantis['s] ... real focus — as with his speech at the National Conservatism conference in Miami in September — was on results (a word he repeated). Mr. DeSantis promised competent leadership; “sanity” and “liberty” were his motifs. For most of the speech, the governor sounded very much the Reaganite conservative from central casting. “We said we would ensure that Florida taxed lightly, regulated reasonably and spent conservatively,” he said, “and we delivered.”
He's struggling in the polls now because he made the strategic decision to wait until after Florida's legislative session to announce his presidential candidacy. He wants to present voters with a bundle of results, tied in a neat bow. Meanwhile, Trump is under indictment, facing more legal trouble, and still whining about his 2020 loss -- and he's surging. DeSantis connects with right-wing emotions in a scripted way, and he does give voters some of what they want. But Trump is a walking bundle of grievances. His post-indictment speech was a greatest-hits set of those grievances. The base would rather hear about everything that's wrong than hear how DeSantis is carefully making everything right through the legislative process. And that's why Trump's primary poll numbers are soaring.

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