Poor Ron DeSantis. One of his propagandists at The National Review has buried his beloved candidate and erected a gravestone to his memory. I’m just wondering if he bothered to text DeSantis to let him know that his campaign for president is over? No eulogy is forth coming from Jeffry Blehar, at least not yet. But his reality check on DeSantis was both one part delusional (praise for DeSantis) and the other part harshly realistic (more like pouring liquid nitrogen on DeSantis).
Let’s get the delusion/lies part out of the way:
You may not have realized it because of the gimlet-eyed tone of my coverage of the Republican primary over the last year, but I am a Ron DeSantis supporter. (That’s fine — I am regularly accused of being everything from “in the bag for Trump” to a guaranteed Biden vote.) DeSantis has been a superb governor for the State of Florida. He managed one of the most life-changing crises of modern history — the pandemic — in a way that should be treated as a case study in leadership by future generations. His “culture warring” (with Disney, with transgender content in elementary-school curriculums, etc.) may offend some fainter hearts but is exactly the sort of lawful fightback I believe is welcome against a series of American institutions rotten to their core with progressive derangement.
The above should make anyone from Florida with a few brain cells extremely angry. Blehar is lying about how DeSantis “handled” the COVID pandemic. As I have stated on numerous occasions, DeSantis is standing on a pile of corpses. And the “culture warring” is nothing but hatred of the LGBTQ+ community and black citizens of Florida. In other words, Blehar is nothing but a fuckin’ fascist.
It’s always great to see the rag created by William F. Buckley Jr embrace fascism. The same Buckley who supposedly chased The John Birch Society extremists out of the GOP. Yeah, right.
But Blehar is not here to praise little Caesar, but to bury him.
DeSantis had my vote and never seriously threatened to lose it; I didn’t even mind when he said or did cringeworthy things on the campaign trail (his answers on Social Security in particular were gagworthy to any honest man); certainly not when the other primary options on offer are Nikki Haley and (no, thanks, ever) Donald Trump. Having laid my cards out on the table like this, however, it’s time to turn the tarot over and give the DeSantis campaign its reading: the Death card.
There’s no other way to put it: It’s over for the DeSantis presidential campaign after going “all in” in Iowa and getting thumped by 30 points, with Trump reaching a majority in the state. Yesterday, after narrowly edging out Haley for a distant second place, DeSantis put on a brave face in his concession speech and said that “in spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa.” I guess you can’t go out and deliver a speech saying, “We staked it all on winning and we lost it all, hard,” so I won’t hold it against the campaign for remaining quiet for a decent interval of mourning. But given the catastrophic failure of its primary strategy and well-known money problems, it’s hard to see how the DeSantis campaign makes it to New Hampshire, much less South Carolina or beyond, unless as a purely rhetorical exercise.
Now, Blehar does a little bit of DeSantis revisionism later in his terminal diagnosis of his campaign. Blehar claims that DeSantis betting the farm on Iowa was ALWAYS the plan. I seem to recall that when DeSantis was rolling in corporate cash his campaign was making plans to campaign in multiple states and not just Iowa. The fact that DeSantis had to go “all in” on the Iowa caucus is that DeSantis pissed most of his campaign cash on luxury travel and items for himself and his wife.
I know I read about that because his donors were like, “WTF are you doing with our money?!!” Private jets! Luxury hotels! DeSantis lived high on the hog, and this resulted in him laying off half of his campaign staff!
Also, Blehar admits to the fact that DeSantis was in a distant third place in New Hampshire, but Blehar kind of glosses over why DeSantis was not popular there. He posits that there a lot more “moderates” in New Hampshire. Really? Last time I checked, New Hampshire Republicans were really not so moderate. They are economic conservatives who love low taxes and little to no big government regulations. And it was New Hampshire Republicans who put Trump back in the driver seat in 2016 when he lost Iowa to Ted Cruz.
So how come DeSantis was not popular in New Hampshire with Republicans? According to Blehar, DeSantis was a “superb” governor with a winning message on “culture warring.” Shouldn’t this be a hit everywhere, especially with Republican voters?
Maybe it had to do with the fact that DeSantis’s policies SUCK, as does his personality?? Maybe book banning isn’t a big hit with every Republican? Maybe the government taking away a woman’s right to reproductive freedom was not popular in the “Live Free or Die” state?
Note to Blehar: making abortion illegal again isn’t popular with most Americans, you fuckin’ dipstick.
Anyway, the DeSantis strategy was to spring board from Iowa and go directly to South Carolina where the Republican base there is more like Iowa. And once DeSantis won SC, the path for DeSantis would open up to win the nomination. And we would have the Trump slayer that some Republicans wanted.
But once you trudge through all of Blehar’s BS, you get to what he calls a post mortem on DeSantis:
Perhaps that theory of the case was nonsense all along, or perhaps no theory of the case would have availed a challenger to Trump after his indictments caused the Republican base to rally around him to the tune of 60 percent in national support. I am less interested in criticizing the DeSantis campaign’s strategy or management — many of those pieces have been written; many more are coming — than in simply noting that it didn’t work. DeSantis’s investment in Iowa was complete: He did the famed “full Grassley” tour of all 99 of Iowa’s counties, secured endorsements from a majority of the state’s Republican lawmakers as well as those of Governor Kim Reynolds and Evangelical Christian leader Bob Vander Plaats, and . . . he lost by 30 points to a man who barely bothered to show up in the state to campaign. All of the time and money DeSantis spent in the state, all of the high-level endorsements he garnered, failed to move the needle: He was polling at around 21 percent in Iowa at the time Reynolds and Vander Plaats endorsed him in November 2023. He finished with . . . 21 percent of the vote. Where to from here? Super Tuesday?
There’s nothing more to add, despite how glum the failure of the DeSantis campaign — and this entire farce of a primary season — makes me, because I deliver coroner’s reports better than I do eulogies. When presidential candidates deliver concession speeches (and, remember, almost all seekers of a presidential nomination are necessarily losing ones), they typically refer to there “no longer being a path” forward; it’s a graceful way to bow to the inevitable loss. There is no plausible path forward remaining for Ron DeSantis, who I am convinced would have made the best Republican president of the United States on offer during the 2024 cycle. There is no distance left to run.
I think it is a little late for Blehar to have an “intervention” with DeSantis. One of those many political obituaries on DeSantis has a succint quote from one of his former political advisors. According to this person, DeSantis thinks he is the smartest man in the room, and everyone else is an idiot. I doubt the “superb” governor DeSantis would listen to Blehar declare him as dead as that parrot in the Monty Python sketch.
Pity poor Blehar. /s.
