DeSANTIS HAD A CHANCE TO BE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA'S FAVORITE REPUBLICAN (AND IN THEORY IT COULD STILL HAPPEN)

Here's the headline of a Ron DeSantis press release:

‘Built On Muscle:’ The DeSantis Campaign’s Playbook to Beat Trump and Shock the Haters

Whoops! Sorry -- that's not a press release. It's a story from Marc Caputo of The Messenger that just reads like a press release.

Caputo might be DeSantis's biggest cheerleader in the mainstream media. When he was at NBC last year, he published DeSantis-fluffing stories such as "DeSantis' Education Message Is Winning in Battleground States, Teacher Union Poll Finds" and "Ron DeSantis Outflanks Trump on the Right with His Call for Covid Vaccine Probe." I'm not sure what DeSantis did to impress Caputo that much, but the Messenger story makes clear that the governor's campaign plans for Iowa have him utterly bedazzled:

Donuts for Iowa lawmakers. A 99-county pastor recruitment plan. An in-house marketing department outpacing competitors on Facebook.

Seven weeks after launch, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is entering a new phase of its online outreach and ground game – all of it fueled by his $20 million fundraising quarter, the largest haul of any first-time Republican White House hopeful in more than a decade.

“We're not built on sugar highs,” Generra Peck, DeSantis’s campaign manager, told The Messenger. “We’re built on muscle that remains even amid the inevitable ups and downs that happen in the course of the campaign.”

(Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think Republicans voters, in Iowa and elsewhere, want sugar highs. That's why Trump is leading.)

... the campaign’s in-house marketing team ... has created and algorithmically message-tested 14,000 ads and related variations on Facebook and other social media platforms to curry supporters and convert them into donors and voters. The operation displays a level of “sophistication” that other campaigns currently aren’t showing, one independent Republican digital guru told The Messenger.

Sounds good, although it also seems as if DeSantis might have a plan that will look brilliant until Trump punches him in the mouth. But we'll see. I guess DeSantis deserves some credit for not giving up.

Here, in my opinion, is the most important part of all this:

DeSantis, who has so far limited most interviews to conservative press, is preparing for more sit-downs soon with more mainstream media outlets with which he has had a strained relationship.

DeSantis misunderstood Trump's approach to the media. Yes, you refer to mainstream journalists as the enemy, as fake news, as Democratic operatives -- but you also court the same journalists you denounce. Behind the scenes, you treat mainstream reporters the way John McCain treated them. It works.

Or it least it can work. DeSantis will probably be humorless, awkward, and snappish in his mainstream interviews -- but if he could learn to be genuinely polite to mainstream reporters when they're conversing privately, suddenly much of the mainstream media would be writing about what a political genius he is and warning Trump that he needs to watch his back. The press desperately wants an alternative to both Trump and Joe Biden, and DeSantis is available, but when he rolled out his campaign, he missed the opportunity to be the liberal media's favorite Republican, because he'd committed himself to the strategy of freezing out mainstream journalists. The MSM was ready to portray him as a safe moderate, as seen in this paragraph from a 2022 New Yorker profile:

In office, DeSantis took steps that suggested he intended to govern closer to the center. He buoyed environmentalists by forcing out the nine-member board of the South Florida Water Management District, political appointees who were considered hostile to environmental interests. He named a commission to tackle algae blooms, which befouled rivers and lakes in the southern part of the state. And he appointed several Black jurists. At his inauguration, DeSantis asked the Reverend R. B. Holmes, the pastor of a predominantly Black church in Tallahassee, to lead the prayer. “I was encouraged,” Holmes told me.

He could still persuade the mainstream press that he might be a "pragmatist" if he put in some effort, and he could probably do it without actually moderating his positions -- remember, the press worked hard to convince us that both George W. Bush and Donald Trump would govern as moderates. Fortunately foor the country, DeSantis will probably fail at this. Let's hope so.