South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Why Ron DeSantis won’t be president
FORT LAUDERDALE — The word is really starting to get around about Ron DeSantis.
What Floridians have known for years is being talked about all over the country.
He’s a cold fish who doesn’t connect with people on a personal level. He “struggles with basic social skills” and has an “aloof public persona,” The Daily Beast told its readers this week. The story had an anecdote about his eating habits, which is irresistible fodder for late-night monologues.
Aloof doesn’t begin to describe a governor who turns on his heels after a press conference and darts toward a waiting state-owned SUV, blowing off the time-honored political rituals of shaking hands or engaging in small talk.
People in Florida who drove long distances and rearranged their schedules to meet him in person might as well have stayed home and watched it on the Florida Channel.
At an event in Iowa last week, DeSantis used bike racks to create a barrier between himself and his audience. The New York Times reported that he ticked off a crowd of Texas Republicans by not speaking to them after they had paid extra money to hear him at a recent event in Houston.
DeSantis’ public image won’t be able to withstand the relentless national media microscope. His detached style seems especially poorly designed for the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters are accustomed to one-on-one interactions with presidential candidates.
He did get mostly favorable reviews at a pair of big, well-attended events in Davenport and Des Moines, and he will soon make his first big appearance in New Hampshire, at the state GOP’s annual Amos Tuck fundraising dinner at the Doubletree in Manchester on April 14.
“Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?” former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum asked in The Atlantic this week.
He noted the juxtaposition between the culture war sideshows DeSantis is constantly promoting and the real-life struggles people face, on such issues as skyrocketing property insurance and the lack of health care or affordable housing. When DeSantis is asked to state a position on a vitally important issue, he blows it, as he did when he called the war in Ukraine “a territorial dispute.”
Meanwhile, the news on the home front keeps gets worse by the day as the Legislature
in lockstep rushes to enact a DeSantis agenda engineered for the hard right.
A sampling of headlines from Florida’s Capitol this week: “House poised to pass voucher expansion.” “Senators back immigration crackdown.” “Six-week abortion limit backed in House.” “Lawmakers support defamation changes.”
DeSantis is not the first Florida governor who wanted to be president. There are others, and I once followed one of them as he traveled across Iowa and New Hampshire.
Reubin Askew, a middle-of-the-road Democrat, was one of Florida’s best governors (1971-1979) back when the state was still a shade of blue. He faltered early in 1984, the year that Democrats made Walter Mondale their sacrificial lamb against a popular and re-election-minded Ronald Reagan.
Tall and standoffish, Askew too had a slight air of aloofness about him. But he connected easily with the people of New Hampshire (see for yourself in a long story I reported for WPLG, Channel 10 in Miami, which is on YouTube).
Unlike DeSantis, Askew didn’t mind having reporters follow him around.
“I think they want to look you square in the eyes,” one voter told me in the living room of a little house in Franklin, N.H. “If you look’em straight in the eyes, they can tell a lot by you.”
It was true then and it is still true today. New Hampshire hasn’t changed very much in the last 40 years, and looking somebody straight in the eye has never been one of Ron DeSantis’ strengths.
That’s why Iowa and New Hampshire still matter. They force candidates to get out from behind that bike rack.