Like everyone else, I listened to DeSantis’s botched Twitter Spaces launch, but then reached some conclusions about the trajectory of his campaign at New York:
Before long, the laughter over the technical glitches that marred Ron DeSantis’s official presidential campaign launch with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces will fade. We’ll all probably look back and place this moment in better perspective. Political-media folk (not to mention DeSantis’s Republican rivals and Democratic enemies) tend to overreact to “game changing” moments in campaigns when fundamentals and long-term trends matter infinitely more. Relatively few actual voters were tuned in to Twitter to watch the botched launch, and even fewer will think less of DeSantis as a potential president because of this incident.
It mattered in one respect, however: The screwed-up launch stepped all over a DeSantis campaign reset designed to depict the Florida governor as a political Death Star with unlimited funds and an unbeatable strategy for winning the GOP nomination. The reset was important to rebut the prevailing story line that DeSantis had lost an extraordinary amount of ground since the salad days following his landslide reelection last year, when he briefly looked to be consolidating partywide support as a more electable and less erratic replacement for Donald Trump. For reasons both within and beyond his control, he missed two critical strategic objectives going into the 2024 race: keeping the presidential field small enough to give him a one-on-one shot at Trump and keeping Trump from reestablishing himself as the front-runner with an air of inevitability about a third straight nomination.
To dissipate growing concerns about the DeSantis candidacy, the top chieftains of his Never Back Down super-PAC let it be known earlier this week that they had a plan that would shock and awe the political world, based on their extraordinary financial resources (fed by an $80 million surplus DeSantis transferred from his Florida reelection campaign account). The New York Times wrote up the scheme without questioning its connection to reality:
“A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.
“The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns….
“The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million.”
In case the numbers didn’t properly document the audacity of this plan, Team DeSantis made it explicit. The Times report continues:
“‘No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,’ said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. ‘This has just never even been dreamed up.’” …
At the helm of the DeSantis super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Mr. [Ted] Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016. In an interview, Mr. Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers by the fall would be roughly double the peak of Senator Bernie Sanders’s entire 2020 primary campaign staff.
Clearly opening up the thesaurus to find metaphors for the extraordinary power and glory of their plans, one DeSantis operative told the Dispatch they were “light speed and light years ahead of any campaign out there, including Trump’s.”
Now more than ever, DeSantis’s campaign will have to prove its grand plans aren’t just fantasies. Those doors in Iowa really will have to be knocked. Thanks to Trump’s current lead, DeSantis will absolutely have to beat expectations there and do just as well in New Hampshire and South Carolina before facing an existential challenge in his and Trump’s home state of Florida. And while DeSantis had a good weekend in Iowa recently, picking up a lot of state legislative endorsements even as Trump canceled a rally due to bad weather that never arrived, he’s got a ways to go. A new Emerson poll of the first-in-the-nation-caucuses state shows Trump leading by an astonishing margin of 62 percent to 20 percent. And obviously enough, Iowa is where DeSantis will likely face the largest number of rivals aside from Trump; he’s a sudden surge from Tim Scott or Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or even Vivek Ramaswamy away from a real Iowa crisis.
Door knocking aside, a focus on Iowa, with its base-dominated caucus system and its large and powerful conservative Evangelical population, will likely force DeSantis to run to Trump’s right even more than he already has. The newly official candidate did not mention abortion policy during his launch event on Twitter; that will have to change, since he has a crucial opportunity to tell Iowa Evangelicals about the six-week ban he recently signed (similar, in fact, to the law Iowa governor Kim Reynolds enacted), in contrast to Trump’s scolding of the anti-abortion movement for extremism. DeSantis also failed once again to talk about his own religious faith, whatever it is; that will probably have to change in Iowa too. He did, however, talk a lot during the launch about his battle against the COVID-19 restrictions the federal government sought to impose on Florida even during the Trump administration. That will very likely continue.
The glitchy launch basically cost DeSantis whatever room for maneuvering he might have enjoyed as the 2024 competition begins to get very real — less than eight months before Iowa Republicans caucus (the exact date remains TBD). He’d better get used to spending a lot of time in Iowa’s churches and Pizza Ranches, and he also needs to begin winning more of the exchanges of potshots with Trump, which will only accelerate from here on out. All the money he has and all the hype and spin his campaign puts out won’t win the nomination now that Trump is fully engaged, and it sure doesn’t look like the 45th president’s legal problems will represent anything other than rocket fuel for his jaunt through the primaries. So for DeSantis, it’s time to put up or shut up.
Perhap’s Obama’s infatuation with Reagan gives insight as to what his plans are as to how he will president as President. From Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s History of Presidential Elections, 1789-1984:
Reagan’s political strength was similar to that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was a personal not a party, phenomenon. Without Reagan, the Republicans would be much weaker. The first major political event of the year, therefore, was Reagan’s decision to seek reelection despite his age. At 73, he was already the oldest man ever to serve in the White House. The Democrats dared not to make Reagan’s advanced age an issue; his evident physical vigor and unbroken record of good health made the fact of his age a matter for public admiration rather than concern. This admiration was bolstered by the presidents insouciant response to the shooting attempt on his life in March 1981. “I forgot to duck,” he joked to his wife. As he was about to undergo surgery for removal of the bullet, he’s wisecracked to the surgeons, ‘I hope you are all Republicans.’
If reporters noted that Reagan worked only five or six hours a day, spent long weekends at Camp David, and took frequent vacations, this too, was not circumstance the Democrats could easily convert into an issue. After President Carter’s long hours and studious work, and the earlier crises of the Nixon and Johnson years, Reagan had hung President Calvin Coolidge’s portrait in the Cabinet room as a symbol of his esteem for that Republican predecessor. Like Coolidge’s famous naps, Reagan’s relaxed approach to the Presidency was not only acceptable to the country but actually reassuring. It was as if the man at the top was signaling the nation that things were not as bad as the news media would have the public believe.
Reagan’s administrative style was not an accommodation to his advancing years. It was a continuation of the way he had governed California for eight years from 1967 to 1975. He viewed himself as a chairman of the board, rather than as an active executive. He delegated to senior aides most of his administrative power over appointments, legislation, the budget, and supervision of departments and agencies. He involved himself on a day-to-day basis in only a few issues. He was content to prove by broad policy direction and to serve as his administration’s most persuasive spokesman. A at the middle and upper levels of his administration, there were frequent struggles for power and for control of policy among Cabinet officers and factions of the White House staff. Rivals waged ideological and personal feuds through “leaks” to the press. These conflicts did the President no political harm; Reagan stayed above these battles, clearly unconcerned about any inefficiency or loss of morale that infighting might produce, and serenely confident of his ability to impose his will if and when he chose to do so. Since the huge expansion of the activities of the federal government had begun under Franklin Roosevelt a half-century earlier, no President had governed with such a loose rein.
Reagan was unfamiliar with the details or even the main issues in many disputes, both foreign and domestic. Indeed, the breath of his ignorance was sometimes startling. In October, 1983, for example, at a time when U.S.–Soviet arms control negotiations were breaking down, The New York Times reported that Reagan told a group of visitors that he had only recently learned that most of the Soviet nuclear deterrent force was in land-based rather than submarine-based missiles. Surprisingly this disclosure evoked relatively little public comment.
Like Eisenhower, but to an even greater extent, Reagan stayed politically popular by distancing himself in public from his own administration. Scandals occurred and controversies flared, but the President, not ever having involved himself closely with most of these appointees or the problems confronting them, was untouched.
Having been elected as an opponent of big government, Reagan said in his inaugural address government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Once in office, he continued in speeches around the country to attack Washington and the bureaucracy. He faltered to believe that he and his fellow citizens were allies against the government rather than that he had been chosen by them to direct the affairs of that government.
Reagan’s detached style of governing, his distancing himself from his own appointees and the career bureaucracy, and his blithe cheerfulness and impertubable optimism was central to the political problem faced by the Democrats in 1984. Reagan was dubbed “the Teflon President: nothing sticks to him.” It was significant that in the fourth year of his Presidency there were no anti-Reagan jokes of the kind that normally circulate about Presidents. There seemed to be no audience for them. Politicians of both parties reported that many constituents disagreed with the President’s policies, distrusted his intentions, or questioned his competence, and yet avowed that they liked him personally. Democrats in Congress and at the state level were consequently reluctant to mount against him the kind of sustained attacks that had weakened other recent Presidents.
This liking for Reagan did not have the firm foundation of respect for past accomplishments that undergirded a liking for Eisenhower in the 1950s. Nor was there the profound gratitude and loyalty from broad masses of people that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s innovative programs had evoked. Still less was Reagan a hero who inspired emulation and enthusiasm, particularly among younger voters, as John F. Kennedy did. The liking for Reagan was a reflection of his sunny disposition, a reciprocation of his positive approach. It also correlated closely with the trend of the economy.
If this is what we are ion for, I prefer to pass and prefer the Clinton gamble. Obama’s handlers are filled with “hasbeen” Democrats who would love to govern by committee!!!!! In my humble opinion, Obama is no JFK, RFK, and is being used as a poster child for evryon’es dream of a real capable African-American politician which he is average, and is a coriporation filled with deception. His hiuse and land deal, his arrogance, and lack of content in his speeches are indications of status que bunk.
Professor/Dr. Neil Garland-We Deserve Better Than Average Presidents
I don’t believe Jesse Jackson ran in 1992. I know he ran in 1984 and 1988. The only African-American I recall making a bid for the presidency was Doug Wilder and I’m not sure that he ever officially announced or made it to any caucuses or primaries.
“E.J. might have added another parallel: Bill Clinton’s trump card in the 1992 nominating contest was his overwhelming support among African-Americans.”
One problem with that analogy is that “overwhelming black support” is a “trump card” only if one is a white candidate………..otherwise, if the candidate is African-American, he runs the risk of being seen as just another Jesse Jackson-like candidate, having an African-American base with support from upscale, educated whites and the young…
If I recall, Bill Clinton didn’t “win” the African-American primary vote in 1992……….he just got more of it than any of the other white candidates…….the “winner” of the A-A vote was, of course, Reverend Jackson….
I’ll be interested in seeing how Obama’s voter demographics change (or don’t change)as he is perceived as getting more and more of the A-A vote…