Fighting at the kids’ table and calling it a ‘debate’
Despite Gov. Ron DeSantis’ favored position at center stage, the second Republican debate was already 16 minutes old by the time he first spoke Wednesday night.
When he did, it was to parrot Chris Christie, who criticized Donald Trump for not showing up.
“Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight,” DeSantis said. “He owes it to you to defend his record.”
DeSantis was right, of course, but it was too little, too late. DeSantis and his rivals have been so unwilling to confront Trump on anything, for fear of offending his MAGA base, that this mild rebuke qualified as news. Pathetic.
Over the course of two hours at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, DeSantis did nothing — zero — to reverse the nosedive of his presidential hopes. He came across as humorless, stilted, rehearsed. He fudged the facts and told only part of the story.
DeSantis made a self-serving statement about how “I vetoed wasteful spending” in Florida. What he didn’t say was that he also vetoed essential spending for programs such as flood control, homelessness, hunger prevention and to help victims of gun violence, all this year alone.
As Mike Pence noted, spending in Florida under DeSantis has ballooned from $92 billion in his first full year as governor to $116.5 billion for next year, an increase of 21% in four years.
A shambles at Simi Valley
The Simi Valley show was a shambles, an unwatchable spectacle of crosstalk, non-answers and personal insults.
The moderators from Fox Business lost control of the proceedings, though they did ask some good questions, such as Stuart Varney’s grilling of DeSantis on the 2.5
million Floridians with no health insurance, higher than the national average.
DeSantis has done nothing as governor to expand the health care safety net, and he appeared to equate Medicaid, the state-federal health care program, with welfare. “We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits in Florida,” DeSantis said. “We’re basically saying, this is a field of dreams.”
This debate-that-wasn’t was such a monumental disappointment that the time has come to scrap the entire format, with its rigid 30- and 60-second time limits, and to reflect on whether these extended shouting matches do more to hurt democracy than to help it. Candidates fudge their answers or worse, lie, as DeSantis did when Nikki Haley
challenged him on energy and he denied favoring a ban on fracking in Florida.
Oh really? On his third day in office, Jan. 10, 2019, DeSantis signed an executive order, No. 19-12, that directed the state environmental agency to “take necessary actions to adamantly oppose all offshore oil and gas activities off every coast in Florida and hydraulic fracturing in Florida.”
DeSantis could have embraced that action, to the delight of independent general election voters who care about environmental protection. But instead, he ran from his own record.
“That is not true,” DeSantis told Haley, shaking his head. (Haley was partly incorrect in that Florida voters banned drilling