Bumbling Ron DeSantis Campaign Enters Terminal 'Finger-Pointing' Blame-Gaming Stage
Bumbling Ron DeSantis Campaign Enters Terminal 'Finger-Pointing' Blame-Gaming Stage
It's all over but the whining.
The zombie campaign of Ron DeSantis may be shambling on to New Hampshire, where it might find enough brains to keep itself alive long enough to make the Nevada and Virgin Islands caucuses, after which it might stumble, growling and moaning and trying to bite Brad Pitt’s arm off, as far as the South Carolina primary and beyond.
But in reality, this campaign has been drawing dead since the moment that voters actually met Ron DeSantis, a two-bit asshole in bad suits who resembles an angry Weeble Wobble, and the postmortems are going to flow like fertilizer runoff into the Everglades from now until whenever Ron finally fucks off back to Tallahassee, taking his smirk, his who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding-Shorty boots, and his bargain-basement Jacqueline Onassis of a wife with him.
Or so says this postmortem in POLITICO on Friday, written by a couple of veteran Republican operatives, who can barely contain their glee as they take DeSantis to task for lighting $130 million on fire:
Tim Pawlenty’s and Scott Walker’s presidential campaigns can breathe a sigh of relief. The mantle of Worst Republican Presidential Campaign Ever has been lifted from their shoulders, stolen by the crew that ran Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign into the dirt.
Wow. Bobby Jindal didn’t even rate a mention. Interpret that as you will.
At the beginning of 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis was in first place, ahead of former President Donald Trump. Then acknowledge that the DeSantis campaign and super PAC raised more money than any other campaign, including that of the former president. Many in the GOP billionaire class gushed over DeSantis, promising to spend whatever it would take to vanquish the former president.
More grist for our theory that no one in the GOP billionaire class has met another human being since a few of them shared lifeboats with the hoi polloi as they escaped the Titanic.
The writers of the piece, Curt Anderson and Alex Castellanos, then spend a couple of thousand words throwing the DeSantis campaign under a grain combine.
Strategy. The DeSantis campaign should have had one.
Oh, the campaign had one. It’s just that it mostly consisted of DeSantis saying, to borrow a phrase from Joe Biden describing Rudy Giuliani, “a noun, a verb, and ‘woke.’” It wasn’t just that he was a “socially awkward nerd, an introvert who did not enjoy people.” Nerds, as they traditionally are coded in political campaigns, are semi-serious academic types with an interest in and command of policy details.
PREVIOUSLY!
Barack Obama, for example, was a nerd. Ron DeSantis is a sour, mean weirdo who bragged about how much he had done to hurt undocumented migrants and transgender people. He seemed to enjoy causing hurt. You could almost imagine a little bedroom action with bargain-basement Jackie O role-playing as a desperate Salvadoran mother or Dylan Mulvaney was the only thing keeping the marriage spicy.
This is also hilarious:
An army of paid doorknockers would fan out across the country, even in states beyond the early primaries, and deliver the nomination to DeSantis. […] When skeptics noted that the advertising was not moving the polls, they were told not to worry: There was a giant, secret army of DeSantis door knockers!
Imagine you live in, say, Concord, New Hampshire, this week, with high temperatures in the mid-20s, and some DeSantis fan wants you to open the door and stand there debating why you should switch your vote from Nikki Haley. (Trump voters are irredeemable, though the DeSantis Army is welcome to try.) We’d rather have to deal with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Anderson and Castellanos do miss in a couple of their points. For example, they complain that DeSantis hired terrible staff, but then the only one they name is Jeff Roe, a consultant who ran disastrous losing campaigns for Josh Mandel and Martha McSally. There is no mention of, just off the top of our heads, Christina Pushaw, his incompetent boob of a rapid response director and onetime press secretary. Pushaw and the communications team made it a point to treat non-wingnut media outlets like dogshit on the bottom of their shoes, then seemed very surprised that doing so only made the outlets cover the campaign tougher.
THESE PEOPLE!
DeSantis himself has even seemed to admit that maybe schmoozing the media would have been helpful, instead of assuming the GOP electorate was all Twitter-addicted Breitbart fans.
Perhaps, for someone so uncomfortable with people, this was the wrong decade — or century.
Well duh.
Soon Ron DeSantis will fold his tent and slink back to his home somewhere in America’s Dingus, but not before he takes a few more pummelings from even his ostensible allies. All of which will be so, so richly deserved.
[POLITICO]
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That picture up top is my favorite image of Gov. Orc-in-an-ill-fitting-human suit. He looks like he just got goosed with a cattle prod, a scenario that gives me joy and some relief from three-o'clock in the morning bad thoughts about the unconscionable cruelty that goes on in the world without my being able to stop it.
Jackie Osantis.