Ron DeSantis’ decision to step aside in the 2024 Presidential Derby is great all around. He really needs to govern Florida for several more years into a second term. He is a great governor, almost certainly the best around today and maybe among the greatest ever. He came in as a barely known congressman who barely eeked past a quasi-criminal mayor from Tallahassee for governor. Not at all impressive. His opponent, Andrew Gillum, was a bum, indicted on 21 felony counts including wire fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements. (Interesting, isn’t it, how Democrats pour millions and volunteer their heads off, singing, “For he’s a jolly good felon / For he’s a jolly good felon,” for candidates with 21 federal felony indictments when it is their guy who belongs in the hoosegow.) The jury hung on everything but the false statements. The race was so pitifully close that, after Gillum conceded, he recanted the next day, as felons often do after first admitting their crimes without an attorney advising them to deny everything, and demanded a recount. In the end, the bum got 49.19 percent of the vote, and DeSantis got 49.59 percent — a razor-thin 0.4 percent edge. DeSantis beat America’s weakest political candidate by less than half a point. Yikes!

And then DeSantis blew the whole state into orbit.

It is amazing that American candidates who win by enormous landslides often end up in ignominy while those who barely make it to the finish line serve in historically great ways. Dwight D. Eisenhower won handily twice, with Adlai Stevenson his convenient foil, but Ike’s presidencies were not distinguished. He just had the enormous good luck of getting to be president right after we eradicated, extirpated, and kind-of exterminated Germany and Japan. We ruled the roost. It was a time of grand peace. Other than some Quakers and a handful of Communists and other leftist crazies, America had fought in unison and now celebrated the hard-won peace in unity. It was not a perfect time; no time is. There was pernicious racism yet to be overcome. Stalin quietly was now beginning to try building his Soviet Union into a greater world power. Mao now was quietly consolidating. On Ike’s watch, the Communists in the Soviet Union and China strengthened their grips, and we ended up in a Korean War that marked the new era of America fighting no longer to win but to contain, which is a nice way to say we now put off the problems until later when they get worse and more perilous. But it was a great time. It seemed the biggest problems bothering most Americans were the kinds that upset the homes of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Ward and June Cleaver, and Donna Reed and her physician husband. Everyone ate dinner together. There was no great Generation Gap. The pill had not yet ushered in all manner of unexpected political and social issues, even as it prevented biological issues. It is not clear that Ike left behind a meaningful legacy. He just lucked out, G-d’s gift to him for leading the Allies through the War.

By contrast, John F. Kennedy barely got elected (and maybe he did not), but he ended up successfully keeping inflation tame, taxes moderate, and achieving greatness by staring Khruschev down, readily agreeing to face off with him over the missiles the Soviets placed in Cuba. He messed up badly with the Bay of Pigs, but JFK demonstrated without blinking that he was prepared to go to World War III if that was the price to pay to keep Soviet ballistic missiles outside the Western hemisphere. They don’t make Democrats like that anymore. Today, with Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, Cuba would be sinking in the waters from the weight of all the Soviet missiles that would be stationed there. One might add, off the instant topic, that Israel might take note that, while Biden and Blinken counsel them to back down and agree to a ceasefire and to stop bombing Hamas frontally to win, the same Americans hardly followed such advice about forestalling backyard murderers and cutthroats when the threat was in our own backyard. When it was our skin on the line, we were ready to go to full nuclear war if that was what it took to keep our backyard tame.

In 1964, “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson (so nicknamed because he stole a razor-thin local election years earlier) really did win by a landslide of historic proportions against Barry Goldwater. One would have thought he would have enjoyed smooth sailing. Yet Johnson’s term ended in disaster, and he had to bow out rather than seek reelection. Presidents never do that, as witness our current doddering executive. But Johnson was challenged vigorously from within his own party by the likes of Sens. Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Kennedy of New York, and he backed out. The 1968 Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, emerged to beat Hubert Humphrey only barely in 1968, helped over the finish line as Democrats self-destructed during their Chicago convention. It was ironic that Mayor Richard Daley’s missteps at the 1968 Chicago convention probably made the difference in winning for 1968 Nixon after the same exact Mayor Richard Daley of the same exact Chicago probably stole the election from 1960 Nixon. History is interesting and fun to learn when it is based on true facts. We really do learn from the real past. Those who deconstruct the lessons of history are doomed to deconstruct the future dangers that loom to their detriment, and they cannot learn from a past they have fictionalized. Nixon came home with 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey with 42.7. (George Wallace ran the most significant third-party campaign in years during that race, garnering 13.5 percent of the vote, 5 states, and 46 electoral votes. Still, with an electoral vote edge over Humphrey of 301–191, Nixon was the one.)

So there was Nixon, with an itsy-bitsy winning margin in 1968, but that did not impede him. He had a remarkable term, pursuing détente with Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin and rapprochement with Red China, and getting to seat three Supreme Court justices, one suitable for his conservative electorate and two apostates. He was never the conservative he portrayed himself as being when it came to walking the walk. But he got to do it his way, despite his paper-thin margin. After naming Warren Earl Burger to the Supreme Court, Nixon perpetrated an historically disastrous perfidy by seating Harry Blackmun after his nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell went down in flames, and then another disaster in Lewis Powell. Still, in 1972 he glided into the biggest landslide ever as he trounced George McGovern. With that kind of massive win, it was predictable — in the crazy topsy-turvy way politics seems to work — that disaster would ensue. He ran into the Arab oil boycott, but his real disaster was the incredibly self-inflicted political nightmare of Watergate. Too sure of himself? Why would anyone break into the opponent’s campaign headquarters, risking the political and legal fallout that could ensue, while enjoying such an overwhelming, insurmountable lead? It is a question not for political scientists but for therapists. (READ MORE: It’s Not Just Watergate: Much of Our Recent History Is Misunderstood)

And so it often has gone. Politicians who barely win go on to achieve great things, unhindered by the slimness of their majorities and perhaps motivated by a sense of “Whaddo I gotta lose?” And huge winners go down in shame and humiliation, not in flames but in infernos, perhaps having become overconfident in their popularity. Indeed, the first George Bush was so popular amid the First Gulf War that it was inevitable he would mistake wildly positive poll numbers with the idea that people actually liked him. Ronald Reagan handed him a great economy and the end of the Cold War. He marched into Panama and arrested Manuel Noriega, locking him up in Florida. And in March 1991, at the height of the Iraq War that drove Saddam Hussein back out of Kuwait, his Gallup polling was at 89 percent, the highest popularity in the history of such polling. Yet, by the time he ran against Bill Clinton 18 months later, he could not win reelection even though the Arkansan with the Loose Zipper never could garner a majority of American voters. Clinton got only a measly 43 percent of the vote, but Bush out-failed him with 37.45 percent. Ross Perot pulled 18.9 percent.

Thus, Ron DeSantis is a governor in that historic mold: He won by so little that he had no choice but to go for broke, prove he would not be hindered by barely winning, and thus be great in office. Indeed, he has been. But Biden’s three years have proven that four years of a predecessor is not enough for that prior executive to implant his changes in the body politic. Trump made his executive orders on Day One, and Biden just as surely reversed them on his Day One before those changes really had come to “stick.” Four years is not long enough. Even eight years is tough to leave a lasting legacy, but sometimes it can stick. An executive needs eight years at least to leave some kind of mark. Reagan had eight years, and he left a strong change, impacting greater American society, even though two Bushes, a Clinton, and an Obama all combined to slice away for 28 years until nothing was left of it.

Conservatives need for Florida to continue showing the way, with a strong conservative governor with real guts — guts enough to take on his state’s powerhouse corporation, Disney; guts to take on the teachers’ unions; guts to take over the state colleges, throw all of DEI out with the trash, set up his own boards of trustees, and re-think the scam of faculty tenure as it presently exists; and guts to ship illegals to the blue states and cities that virtue signal as “sanctuaries” for those who do not have a right to be here.

DeSantis took a swing state and made it solid red by 2022. That was exciting but needs to be consolidated. We saw how Virginia’s initial tilt right for Glenn Youngkin has not quite faltered but also not gained further momentum from his initial gains. Florida needs DeSantis to stay put and consolidate his achievements before moving on. The war on Disney is not over, nor is the war on the woke colleges, nor the wars against the school districts and against the Democrats who would flood Florida with new imported voters if they could. His time will come in 2028, unless Trump (i) is elected in November and (ii) wins the right to run again in 2028 as a 47th president seeking a second term rather than as a person seeking a third term. In that case, DeSantis’ day will come in 2032.

It has been clear for more than a year that Trump will walk away with the GOP presidential nomination. It made kind-of sense for DeSantis to throw his hat in the ring anyway, to explore whether GOP voters would shy away from Trump because of all the indictments, the chaos of his prior term, and other negatives emanating from a mass media that lives off character assassination, in tandem with a Pelosi Democrat criminal enterprise that foisted false charges and perjuries for four years. If, in fact, the GOP base had inclined to turn away from Trump, it was DeSantis’ duty to be in the mix to prevent the nod from going to a McCain/Romney/Bush Republican, several of whom ran, with one still in the mix. But the base has remained with Trump, and DeSantis has read the tea leaves correctly before allowing New Hampshire’s insane crossover primary system to derail him.

It’s all good.

Rav Fischer’s previous intense televised debate with a national leader in the anti-Semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) can be found here.

His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the rise of modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions and decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the underground and video interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.

His latest deeply moving series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas Gaza war may be found here. Because of some sensitive subject matter and viewing content relating to Hamas terror, YouTube is restricting some of the early programs to viewers 18 and up.

And his 40-part Bible study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) is now up here.