GOP VOTERS WANT THEIR HEROES TO PUNCH LIBERALS IN PERSON, NOT BY PROXY

Well, this is just what you'd expect from Ron "Mr. Excitement" DeSantis -- he's about to take a step that will lead to another step that will lead, eventually, to a presidential campaign:

On Monday, the Florida governor’s political operation is set to move into its new base of operations, which will trigger disclosure requirements with federal officials....

That move will require the not-yet-filed campaign to spend more than $5,000 and, under Federal Election Commission guidelines, when someone running for federal office spends more than $5,000, they are required to register, file financial reports and designate a principal campaign committee.

Functionally, the office move will require DeSantis to file paperwork with federal election officials within 15 days, thus acknowledging publicly for the first time that he is running for president.

“The DeSantis team has been housed at the Florida GOP building since the re-elect,” said a veteran Republican consultant. “They are gearing up to move out soon. In moving, they would be spending funds and [it] most likely would force them to file a ‘Form 1‘ with the FEC, which would force an announcement sooner rather than later.”

A Form 1! Wowee! The excitement is almost too much to bear!

In The New York Times, Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan try to explain "Why Ron DeSantis Is Limping to the Starting Line." (Yes, that's the embarrassing headline.) They blame DeSantis's refusal to announce until after the end of Florida's legislative session, as well as his donor-alienating positions on abortion and Ukraine, and also his lack of personal skills. But they only briefly touch on something that a Times opinion writer correctly identifies as a major DeSantis mistake -- one that Donald Trump isn't making:

... the most basic lesson to be drawn by Republican politicians from watching Trump’s [CNN] town hall is the importance, for any would-be Trumpian successor, of demonstrating that you too can engage with the mainstream press and come away a winner.

... it’s the opposite of the DeSantis method, which has been to stiff-arm the mainstream media (with a side of mockery from his friends and allies on Twitter). That’s fine for the governor of a rightward-trending state trying to get things done locally and build support with conservative activists. But it’s not what Republican voters actually seem to want from their national champions. They want the show, the battle, the drama. And you can’t really own the libs, in the end, if you won’t even take their questions.

That's from Ross Douthat. He's right. The rage monsters of the GOP electorate don't want their presidential nominee simply to declare from on high that the libs deserve to be abused. They want their nominee to do the abusing personally.

This doesn't just apply to reporters. Here's a Guardian story about the climate of fear in Florida classrooms:

Adam Tritt, a high school English teacher in Palm Bay, Florida, was shocked when his school’s librarian – eager to comply with Florida’s new law restricting “inappropriate” books in schools – removed one-third of the books on his classroom shelves, including a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that was not on her list of approved books.

Vivian Taylor, a seventh-grade teacher in Miami, says she was told to hardly discuss Emmett Till ... in her civics classes because under Florida’s year-old “stop woke” law, “people say you’re not supposed to talk about that because it will make children uncomfortable”.

Carol Cleaver, a middle-school science teacher in Pensacola, says that when LGBTQ+ students who are feeling hopeless or depressed approach her to discuss their emotional troubles, she, different from before, often balks at telling them about a crisis support hotline for young LGBTQ+ people. She fears that if she mentions it, she will get in trouble under the Parental Rights in Education bill (known as the “don’t say gay” law)....

As the summer holidays approach, Florida teachers are feeling anxious, confused and beaten down....

DeSantis is a sick sadist for doing this to teachers -- but to Republican voters nationwide, he probably doesn't seem sadistic enough. I'm sure they'd like him to terrorize these teachers face-to-face.

Remember Chris Christie? No, not the pathetic loser who ran a futile presidential campaign in 2016 and might be planning another one in this cycle. I mean the early Chris Christie -- before Bridgegate and before the Obama hug, both of which made him a pariah in his own party. People forget, but Christie was the ur-Trump -- a thug who enjoyed attacking journalists, unionized teachers, and other people who dared question him almost as much as Fox News viewers nationwide enjoyed watching him do it. In 2012 it would have been difficult for Christie to beat the deep-pocketed Mitt Romney in the primaries and Barack Obama in the general election, but a lot of people wanted him to try. And you can understand why. Here were his poll numbers in March 2011:

The New Jersey governor scores the highest rating of any Republican in [a] Quinnipiac University survey, which asked how warmly respondents feel about various political figures and used the answers to calculate something of a hotness index. Christie’s hotter than any other Republican by this measure, at 57 degrees.

Among all political figures tested, Christie’s heat was only topped by First Lady Michelle Obama’s 60 degrees and former President Bill Clinton’s 59.2 degrees....

Mitt Romney fell lower on the list at 50.4 degrees.

What did the people who liked Christie respond to? This:



This is what Republican voters want. They wanted this a decade ago, long before Trump was a candidate, and they want it now. DeSantis is too averse to human contact -- even hostile human contact -- to give them the in-person brutality they crave.