Highlights Of The Newsom-DeSantis Debate We Didn't Watch Either

Newsom brought facts and wit. DeSantis brought a Poop Map.

Desantis plays the poop card. Video screenshot, Acyn on Twitter.

Fox News last night staged a debate between Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, calling it the “Great Red vs. Blue State Debate” — a serious exchange of views on governing philosophy between the governors of two of the most populous states, hosted by Sean Hannity, a very serious news guy just like, say, Bill Moyers. We’ll readily admit we didn’t watch, because this was Fox News, not exactly a network famous for serious anything.

Here’s an example of the high-minded discussion: DeSantis said “San Francisco” a lot, signaling to Fox viewers that Newsom is pure evil and chaos incarnate.

“Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco,” DeSantis said. “So he took the San Francisco model, turned that into a template for California’s collapse. Now the Left wants to take the California model and use that as a template for America’s collapse.”

In his own opening statement, Newsom acknowledged that there are “profound differences” between himself and DeSantis, adding that he and the Florida governor have at least one thing in common: “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024.”

Apparently DeSantis agreed to Newsom’s August social media challenge to debate him because DeSantis figured it might help his sad, sputtering campaign. Or maybe he thought it would be easy to win some points by rolling out his culture wars bullshit against a Real Live Liberal Degenerate.

At one point, DeSantis pulled out a color copy of That One Page from Gender Queer, lying that it was part of school curricula (it’s not, though it’s in some high school libraries) and that “This is pornography, it’s cartoons, it’s aimed at children ...” (It’s not porn, it is in graphic novel format, and it’s not for children, but fine for older adolescents. It’s a very good book, but not taught in any classrooms.)

Newsom replied that DeSantis “has been on a banning binge — 1,406 books have been banned just last year under Ron DeSantis’s leadership.” He noted that DeSantis pulls out that one page “all over the campaign trail,” and asked DeSantis to justify other book-banning decisions in Florida: “What’s wrong with Toni Morrison’s books? What’s wrong with Amanda Gorman’s poetry?” (OK, Newsom didn’t include a Wonkette link; that was me.) DeSantis lamely claimed they weren’t banned, but get outta here, they were.

DeSantis tried to beat up Newsom over coronavirus policy, because lockdowns are tyranny and children weren’t in school where they could be infected like they should have. Newsom pointed out that, until it became unpopular with the Right, DeSantis had actually closed businesses and made a big show of distributing vaccines when they were first available.

“You followed science; you followed Fauci,” Newsom said, adding that DeSantis had also previously worn a mask and promoted Covid vaccines. “He decided to fall prey to the fringe of his party, and as a consequence of that, Ron, tens of thousands of people lost their lives.”

On immigration, Newsom attacked DeSantis for sending state agents to Texas to lie to migrants so he could ship them to Martha’s Vineyard and to “a parking lot in Sacramento.” He said DeSantis’s stunts, using human beings as pawns to troll blue states, should disqualify DeSantis from ever being taken seriously on immigration, and added,

I’m the only guy here that is a border state governor. You’re trolling folks trying to find migrants to play political games to get some news so you can out-Trump Trump, and by the way — how is that going for you? You’re down 41 points in your own state.

There was a lot of that kind of thing. Hannity and DeSantis would depict California as a crime-ridden hellhole, and Newsom pointed out that Florida’s murder and gun violence is much higher than California’s because it’s the guns, stupid. Newsom hammered DeSantis on Florida’s draconian abortion ban, arguing that in the unlikely event DeSantis ever became president, he’d probably sign a national ban. DeSantis didn’t reply to that at all. Hannity asked Newsom if he’d ban abortions “in the seventh, eighth, or ninth month” of pregnancy “if the mother’s life was not in jeopardy,” and Newsom pointed out that nobody has an abortion for a trivial reason that late in pregnancy, and it should be a decision between pregnant patients and their doctors (you liar, he did not add).

The high point of the debate was of course the Poop Map. After Newsom pointed out that Florida has the third-worst mental health system in the USA, DeSantis triumphantly pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket:

“This is a map of San Francisco. There’s a lot of plots on that, you may be asking, ‘What is that plotting?’ Well, this is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco, and you see how almost the whole thing is covered.”

Truly a great moment in American Political Discourse. And yes, the poop map visual, from a 2019 tweet, is a thing that exists, and has long been a favorite prop for Republicans who insist that every inch of San Francisco is covered in homeless people’s poo and discarded heroin needles. But details matter: it’s a plot of all reports of feces to the San Francisco Department of Public Works from 2011 to the present — including the far more frequent calls about people who didn’t clean up after their dogs. The city doesn’t note any difference in its records.

But who cares about details? The Poop Gambit was enough for Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany to declare DeSantis the “clear winner” of the debate. That probably won’t matter, since polling shows Nikki Haley moving into place as the top GOP contender against Donald Trump, leaving DeSantis Number Two.

Golly, we’re so sad we didn’t watch the entire two hours.

[NBC News / CalMatters / Curbed San Francisco]

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