{F} lorida governor Ron DeSantis performed impressively in a CNN town hall hosted by anchor Jake Tapper. If you missed the whole broadcast, the highlight reel is also instructive of what might have been.

DeSantis evinced all the warmth and empathy that he has often struggled to summon throughout the campaign. He sloughed off the false pugilistic affect designed, we must assume, to mimic Donald Trump’s style. Instead, he emphasized the bridge-building skills that dismantled Florida’s Democratic coalition in 2022. He distinguished his appeals to the Republican electorate and the manner in which he evaluates moments of crisis in ways that established a real contrast with the frontrunner in the race rather than a comparison.

Gone was the governor who launched his campaign talking about the value of Bitcoin on a buggy website and proceeded to silo himself in niche forums maintained by professional controversialists. The DeSantis who impugns the motives of Americans who support the prosecution of foreign conflicts against America’s adversaries was nowhere to be found. In the place of that version of DeSantis was a relatable and striking figure who had been briefly coached out of existence by the high-priced consultancies with whom the governor surrounded himself.

This overdue pivot was also a sad reminder of the extent to which DeSantis’s core competency — the acumen with which he dismantles and reforms entrenched bureaucracies — seems to have lost the appeal it once had to Republican voters. That may be best illustrated by the governor’s continued focus on Covid-19. In the CNN town hall, DeSantis reiterated a promise he has made to American voters in the past to deliver a “reckoning” with the mistakes American policy-makers made during the pandemic. The country would benefit from that sort of critical retrospective. Tragically, Americans don’t seem to want it.

We need a reckoning with the waste. The country deserves to know what happened to all the “strategic investments” policy-makers threw at their pet projects under the guise that progressive social engineering was a public-health initiative. The roughly $5 trillion the federal government appropriated for Covid relief through 2021 were designed to mitigate the pandemic’s hardships, sure, but they also produced “huge investments in the future,” according to the New York Times. Vast sums, some of which remain unspent, were dedicated to nonsense like environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits” for narcotics users, the refurbishing of arenas and horserace tracks, the expansion of DEI initiatives such as “restorative practices” and “implicit bias” training in public schools, and “tree equity work,” whatever that is. And that’s not accounting for the $163 billion in taxpayer dollars lost to fraud because, as Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz noted, the federal government neglected “even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people.” Where did all the money go?

We need a reckoning with the outcomes. “There is nothing in this data that allows us to draw a straight line from remote learning to student performance,” insisted National Center for Education Statistics chair Dr. Peggy Carr as late as October 2022. If this statement was rendered in ignorance, it’s unfathomable. If it was a product of a malicious desire to mislead, it’s inexcusable. But so much of the press committed itself to a campaign of obfuscation designed to perpetuate the mid-pandemic status quo that there are few clean hands today.

It was not long into the pandemic before parents were stricken with panic over what the Covid mitigation regime was doing to their kids. They said so in poll after poll. But when they weren’t ignored, they were subject to a withering campaign of condescension. “My daughter had a meltdown about having to put sneakers on to go to kindergarten,” said, for example, New York governor Kathy Hochul of the needlessly jumpy parents who feared the effects of social isolation on their children. “She got used to wearing sneakers in school.” Today, learning loss is conventional wisdom. What the experts missed (or ignored) and parents did not was a near future in which the academic performance among a generation of students fell off a cliff — a condition compounded by a widespread crisis of psychological maladjustment in young people. No society invested in its own preservation would decline the opportunity to critically examine the choices that led to these terrible outcomes.

We need a reckoning with relative risk. The pandemic wasn’t responsible for a profound aversion to even the prospect of hazard among America’s most influential elites and the young people who look to them for guidance, but it did intensify that condition. Masking in medical and even veterinary offices remains protocol in some of the country’s most traumatized redoubts. Colleges and universities still retreat to the strictest mitigation measures at the faintest hint that the pandemic could make a comeback. The rise of so-called “hygiene theater” contributed to the rise of “behavioral” maladies, including a spike in hypochondria, depression, and crippling anxiety. Risk-aversion to a degree that precludes taking advantage of opportunity is a learned trait. It was taught, and it can be untaught. But that will not happen in the absence of leadership.

For all his good intentions, this is not the reckoning DeSantis is advertising. He still narrowcasts the vision of a post-Covid reconciliation with the mistakes of the pandemic by focusing on the comeuppance that is owed to people like Anthony Fauci and the malign actors who gave us mRNA vaccine technology. Yes, Fauci misled the public by his own admission in the effort to manipulate the public into behaving in ways he favored. But Fauci is retired. Yes, some recipients of Covid vaccines experienced dangerous or even deadly reactions to those injections. But those numbers pale in comparison to the staggering 270 million Americans who received at least one dose of a vaccine. Eight in every ten of the Americans you encounter on a daily basis have personal experience with one of the Covid-19 shots, and all available data suggest most Americans are grateful for them. To whom is DeSantis attempting to appeal with this conceptualization of a post-Covid “reckoning” but the smallest minority of American voters?

It is not surprising that Americans would be unreceptive to a critical retrospective on the pandemic. The history of previous deadly outbreaks suggests that a national exercise in forgetting reliably follows, if only because Americans do not enjoy looking back on the compromises they made in their fight against an invisible enemy. Nor is it likely that they would commit to that retrospection if it were focused entirely on prosecuting the narrowest grievances nursed only by a small sliver of plugged-in GOP primary voters. Americans who do believe the country would benefit from sober reflection on that terrible time could have a champion in DeSantis. It is a shame that he doesn’t seem to want the job.