All posts tagged: Florida governor

Pour One Out for Ron DeSantis

Pour One Out for Ron DeSantis

Published by skeptic

The Ron DeSantis campaign for president ended the same way it began: as a punch line. What started with a disastrous launch event using the Twitter Spaces audio-chat service in May sputtered to a finish yesterday afternoon with a video uploaded to the social platform, which has since rebranded as X. The Florida governor, in both his scripted remarks and his social-media posts yesterday, misquoted former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “It is,” Justin Reash, the executive director of the International Churchill Society told me, “one of the most commonly used misattributed quotes of Churchill in existence.” So recurrent is the misquotation, in fact, that it appears on the society’s website in a list of commonly bungled comments, right alongside this classic: “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.” To end his campaign-trail hell, DeSantis or some unfortunate member of his staff quoted Churchill as saying, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis The …

Ron DeSantis’s Mad-Bull Strategy – The Atlantic

Ron DeSantis’s Mad-Bull Strategy – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Why did they do it? What was the angle? A presidential candidate such as Ron DeSantis usually would never waste an evening only weeks before the make-or-break early primaries debating a telegenic noncompetitor for a TV pseudo-event. Yet there was DeSantis onstage in Georgia, creating content for Fox News, opposite Gavin Newsom, the sharp-tongued California governor who has publicly ridiculed DeSantis for months. For the Democrat Newsom, the angle is pretty straightforward. He’s a presidential aspirant trying to elbow his way past a serving vice president to establish himself as his party’s heir apparent to the 81-year-old incumbent. Newsom accepted the Fox invitation with one simple plan: to create video moments on unfriendly ground that would cause loyal Democrats to think, We want this guy to fight for us. That thought probably won’t do him any good in the current cycle, when Democrats will surely renominate Joe Biden barring some catastrophic health event. But it could do Newsom a lot of good in future cycles—especially if the Biden-Harris ticket should lose in 2024. Read: Is …

Trump’s Rivals Pass Up Their Chance at the GOP Debate

Trump’s Rivals Pass Up Their Chance at the GOP Debate

Published by skeptic

“We’ve become a party of losers,” the conservative businessman Vivek Ramaswamy declared during the opening minutes of tonight’s Republican primary debate in Florida. He bemoaned the GOP’s lackluster performance in Tuesday’s elections, and then he identified the Republican he held personally responsible for the party’s defeats. Was this the moment, a viewer might have wondered, that a top GOP presidential contender would finally take on Donald Trump, the absent frontrunner who hasn’t deigned to join his rivals on the debate stage? Of course not. Ramaswamy proceeded to blame not the GOP’s undisputed leader for the past seven years but Ronna McDaniel, the party functionary unknown to most Americans who chairs the Republican National Committee. After calling on McDaniel to resign, Ramaswamy then attacked one of the debate moderators, Kristen Welker of NBC News, before turning his ire on two of his onstage competitors, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. The moment was a fitting encapsulation of a debate that, like the first two Republican primary match-ups, all but ignored the candidate who wasn’t there. Five Republicans …

Why Awkward Presidential Candidates Stress Us Out

Why Awkward Presidential Candidates Stress Us Out

Published by skeptic

The teen, it seems, wanted to ask the Florida governor an earnest question. “I can’t legally vote,” the 15-year-old said to Ron DeSantis at an Iowa coffee shop recently. “It’s never stopped the other party from not letting you vote,” DeSantis interjected. I think he was trying to say “from letting you vote,” meaning that Democrats supposedly allow 15-year-olds to vote illegally. (DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) But he bungled his words, and either way, this is not a good joke. It’s especially not a good joke when you consider the second half of the teen’s sentence: “But I struggle with major depressive disorder.” Oof. Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis This wasn’t an isolated moment of interpersonal clumsiness. On the campaign trail, DeSantis frequently behaves like he’s been dragged to a house party and is counting the seconds until he can look at his phone. He dryly remarked to an Icee-slurping kid, “That’s probably a lot of sugar,” and to a crowd of gathered fans that it was …

The Ritual Humiliations of the Iowa State Fair

The Ritual Humiliations of the Iowa State Fair

Published by skeptic

People near me at the Iowa State Fair were frantic. “Do you see him yet?” they panted. “Do you think he’ll come out into the crowd to talk?” When the presence of Secret Service officers made it clear that former President Donald Trump would appear at the Steer ’N Stein restaurant on the Grand Concourse, fairgoers formed a line whose end was out of sight. Not all of them could squeeze into the restaurant, so they filled the street outside, one giant blob of eager, sweating Iowans. When the former president finally appeared, the scrum was so dense that they could barely make out his silhouette through the restaurant’s open side. “You know, the other candidates came here, and they had like six people,” Trump’s giddy voice said through the speakers above us. The audience responded with hoots and cheers. David Axelrod: The indictment is stunning. Will Trump supporters care? One of the few rules of American politics to have withstood the weirdness of these past tumultuous years is that anyone who wants to be …

The Queasy Liberal Schadenfreude of Watching Trump Wreck DeSantis

The Queasy Liberal Schadenfreude of Watching Trump Wreck DeSantis

Published by skeptic

The pleasure is tainted, because the likely result is Trump as the Republican nominee—with a real chance of becoming president again. Jamie Kelter Davis / The New York Times / Redux August 2, 2023, 7:30 AM ET America loves an underdog, but perhaps not as much as it loves to watch a tumbling Icarus. No one’s wings have melted more dramatically and publicly over the past few months than Ron DeSantis’s. Eight months ago, the Florida governor was the man who would finally finish Donald Trump. Today he’s scraping to keep ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy, whom hardly anyone had heard of until recently. Nearly every day, DeSantis seems to have some new problem. A New York Times poll published on Monday shows Trump with a commanding lead over DeSantis, and the specific breakdown of voter attitudes and profiles shows why it will be so hard for DeSantis to close that gap. DeSantis is in the midst of what is described as a campaign reboot but looks mostly like a mass firing, with the same old …