Marble Falls I don’t take any special joy in reading about the trials and tribulations of the Republicans, because let’s be honest, some of their problems are our problems, too, when there’s a chance that they may come back to haunt us. Saying that, I keep up with the zigzag moves of Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, largely because he scares the daylights out of me. One wag described him as “Trump without the drama.” I wish I could remember the pundit’s name and give him full credit, because he had a point, and that’s scary.
Trying to position himself to run for president in the upcoming primaries, he has managed the hard right, the majority of the Florida legislature in Tallahassee so thoroughly that it makes the Politburo seem like a freewheeling body. At his beck and call they have now declared abortion illegal at six weeks, gone after trans people, initiated witch hunts to ban books, and in a totally head scratching move declared Mickey Mouse enemy number one and too “woke.”
How he thought this would help him, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Former president Trump now leads him by 25 points and is going after him hammer and tong. Trump has even hit him hard for the way he eats pudding. Let me ask you, what grown man even eats pudding?
Recently, the chattering class has nailed DeSantis on his lack of “likability.” Others have noted that he has the charisma of a rock. I totally get their point. Reading and listening to his act, I can’t get that line from the Justin Beaver song out of my head that “my mother doesn’t like you, and she likes everyone,” which ought to be one of the classic putdowns of all time, in my humble opinion.
All of this is why DeSantis scares me. Here he is an Ivy Leaguer all the way and trying to position himself to run in the primaries to the right of Attila the Hun. I read today that he’s on a world tour, looking high and low for somebody somewhere to like him. He seems to have said that he is OK with the US and Japan being friends. Good news, I guess, but I honestly didn’t really that it was a big time world-shaking issue.
It takes a lot to make Trump look good, but somehow DeSantis has managed that trick, which might save the country from a fate even worse than Trump were he to slip into the White House somehow, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling bad for our brothers and sisters in Florida who are paying the price for his hubris now and will be for some time to come.