All posts tagged: Michael Dukakis

Why Awkward Presidential Candidates Stress Us Out

Why Awkward Presidential Candidates Stress Us Out

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 Queasy Liberal Schadenfreude of Watching Trump Wreck DeSantis

The Queasy Liberal Schadenfreude of Watching Trump Wreck DeSantis

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 …