MAYBE WE SHOULD BE ROOTING FOR A DeSANTIS COMEBACK

This New York Times story is just sad:

Ron DeSantis Is Young, Has Little Kids and Wants America to Know It

... Mr. DeSantis would be 46 on Inauguration Day if elected, younger than every president since John F. Kennedy. It’s a fact he doesn’t state explicitly, but his campaign has set out to make sure voters get it.

The Florida governor talks frequently about having the “energy and discipline” needed for the White House, keeping a busy schedule of morning and evening events. He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, often speak about their young children, who are 6, 5 and 3 and have joined their parents on the campaign trail. One of the few candidates with kids still at home, Mr. DeSantis regularly highlights his parental worries about schools and popular culture as he presses his right-wing social agenda.

When he signed the state budget on Thursday, he joked that a tax break on one of parenthood’s most staggering expenses — diapers — had come too late for his family, though not by much.

In 1992, did Bill Clinton have to remind people that he was young? Of course not -- he was young and it was obvious. The same for Barack Obama in 2008. By contrast, Ron DeSantis is 44 and doesn't look or act a day over 65.

We knew Clinton liked Elvis and Fleetwood Mac. We knew Obama liked Motown and hip-hop. We knew they'd both gotten high in their youth. Maybe DeSantis could make himself seem more youthful by worrying less about reminding people that he has young children and acting more like a human being who has experienced ordinary human pleasures.

Other than railing against “wokeness,” Mr. DeSantis scarcely mentions cultural influences like television shows, movies, music or social media.... He doesn’t talk much about his love of golf or discuss his hobbies. His references to parenthood are often prompted by his wife.

That fist-pump dance Donald Trump does is horrible, but it makes him seem younger than DeSantis.

I don't believe this "Look at me! I'm young!" approach will work for DeSantis, even in the primaries -- but maybe we should be hoping that Trump drops out of the race and DeSantis wins the nomination as the GOP's clear second choice. I say that because this issue isn't going away:

... the landmark Supreme Court decision one year ago overturning Roe v. Wade is putting abortion opponents increasingly at odds with public opinion and creating political perils for candidates on their side.

In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, one in four Americans say state efforts that have followed to impose strict limits on abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights....

By almost 2-1, 58%-30%, those surveyed opposed the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade....

By 53%-39%, they supported a federal law ensuring access to abortion.

"When 80% of Democrats and 53% of independents want Congress to pass a law ensuring nationwide access to abortion, you get the picture here," said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University's Political Research Center. "Among women in the all-important independent-voter demographic, 63% support a national law. Even 23% of Republican men and women support it."

Trump is trying to sidestep responsibility for what his Supreme Court picks helped unleash with the Dobbs decision. He's claiming credit for Dobbs, but he's also talking up rape and incest exceptions, while DeSantis boasts about his state's six-week abortion ban. In a general election campaign, Trump will try to rebrand himself as an abortion moderate, and I think some voters will fall for it. DeSantis won't -- his instincts always tell him he mustn't make any enemies on the right.

Also, I think DeSantis's allergy to ordinary human enjoyment of life reinforces the (obviously correct) perception that he's an angry, moralizing prig who wants to police private lives. Trump's justices eliminated a national right to abortion, but Trump doesn't seem like a guy who thinks abortion is bad. It makes no logical sense, but I think it would be much easier to run againt DeSantis on this issue.

I know the conventional wisdom is that Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat, but I wonder. Even if you agree with DeSantis, he's like bad-tasting medicine. I think with Nate Cohn and Digby are right: For people who agree with Trump even some of the time, he makes politics seem like fun. I think that makes him harder to fight -- on abortion and many other issues. If he doesn't lose many general-election voters as a result of his legal troubles -- and he might not, especially if he gets no jail time in Manhattan and hasn't gone to trial yet in Florida or any future case -- he could be a lot harder to beat for that reason.