Governor DeSantis has officially launched his campaign for president, and the launch was, to quote from Mad Men, “not great, Bob.” The opening act (found on Twitter here) was two ticks short of a clusterfark. Technical issues caused the Twitter Space to crash continuously for the first 30 minutes, and once the ball got rolling, there were still reports of tech failures. DeSantis’s opening speech was robotic and felt scripted; it is hard to organically play off an audience that cannot be seen or heard, and the rocky start likely rocked the governor.
Nonetheless, the show went on, and as it worked into its substance, the discussion became far more fruitful. The interview-style format became something akin to a long-form podcast, with a strong policy tinge. DeSantis emphasized the fact that Florida is a wildly popular place for Americans to move, in no small part due to his refusal to lock down the state during Covid. He took a strong, intelligent stance on the abuses of the administrative state, explaining in clear terms how out-of-sync American bureaucracies are with the Constitution, and then delving into the complexities of the legal doctrines that created the mess. He defended the actions Florida has taken in defending children from dubious progressive social theories. In sum, he demonstrated a competence on policy of the sort America has not seen from a president in decades.
Of all the words he said and all the attacks he launched, however, there was one word and one attack notably left out. Not once during the Twitter launch did he mention Donald Trump, his main opponent and the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, by name. (That had to wait until a RealClearPolitics interview later that night.) This refusal to go after Trump directly in the campaign’s first event is notable. Along with the technical failures, it will define the immediate narrative for those paying attention. It would be easy for conservatives who look to DeSantis as the best chance to beat Trump to feel dismay. It would be in keeping with a conservative pessimism to doomcast over this launch.
It would also be useless. The launch happened as it happened. It cannot be re-done, and so it is not worth fretting over. The governor is set to barnstorm early primary states over the next two weeks; if that goes well, this failure will be washed away. His ‘Florida Man’ moment may be just a moment, fleeting and forgotten. Or it may be the second coming of Bobby Jindal. None of this changes the matter at hand. Joe Biden is failing as president, and the GOP’s most likely nominee to oppose him is a man who would be nothing short of cataclysmic for the country and for conservatism. The movement and the country need change. As it stands, DeSantis provides the best chance to achieve it. Jim Geraghty wrote in today’s Morning Jolt:
No one who was contemplating voting for DeSantis is now not going to vote for him because Twitter Spaces took too long to start working last night. No one who was opposed to voting for DeSantis is going to change their mind because of last night, either.
Time will tell if this is true. And instead of doomcasting, conservatives should let time tell it.