“The unstated premise of DeSantis’s approach was that there was little point in trying to attract Democratic or even moderate voters; if he got his loyalists outraged enough, they would come to the polls in sufficient numbers for him to win. Stuart Stevens, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign in 2012, told me that Republican leaders have made a calculated choice in recent decades. As their reliable cadre of white voters shrank, they realized that they could either try to attract more minorities or try to motivate white citizens who rarely voted by tapping their racial insecurities.” New Yorker profile of Ron DeSantis.
Quote: “DeSantis’s insistence on preventing mandates sometimes violated the kinds of liberties he championed in his campaign book—former core principles of the Republican Party. Giving people the right to go to work unvaccinated also meant telling companies that they were not free to decide how to manage their employees. And preventing mask mandates meant telling town governments and schools that they were not free to enforce local standards.”
I've just hoped him away in my mind, but many people think DeSantis is the next president. He's more focused hard working than Trump, which if you disagree with him, means he's more dangerous. I saw an interview with an author once where it was suggested we don't elect full functioning people. Bush was a dry alcoholic, Obama was cut off by racist America going against him, and on and on. Clinton was made impotent by his philandering. The elder Bush was a patrician fop. Reagan was a simple minded B actor. America has nerfed it's president in my lifetime.
Trump standing behind a woman saying overturning Roe was a victory for white America, they're not even using code words now, they're straight out saying it.
DeSantis downplayed the vaccine, masks and lockdowns because it played to his base. Like Trump he will only try to whip up his base, not be a president for all of America. He's got aggressive communications. He's redistricted the state, redrawing political lines to essentially gerrymander out democrats and then says efforts to obstruct him are gerrymandering. The Trump flip the script technique. He's side stepping the traditional press to just express himself on the party organ Faux News.
He's profoundly autocratic, anti-democratic, and wants the support of the bottom feeders of white supremacists, ultra right wing ideologues and the deluded community. He's going to say something that alienates him to most of the all but staunch MAGA people, and that's going to whip up the base and get votes. I thought the Trump campaign was terrible, this is going to be miles worse. If DeSantis doesn't whip up the left's base, I don't know what will.
At first I thought the profile of DeSantis was too fair, wasn't critical enough, but as the sort of bald facts come out, he's surrounded himself with hatchet men and women want his ultra right wing agenda.
Welcome to the increasingly intensified partisand America.
Later, “ In June, 2020, the epidemiologists say, the health department terminated the relationship and stopped sharing data. (The department declined requests for comment.) “The only reason you don’t collect data is that you don’t want to know what the data says,” Derek Cummings, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida, said. “The recommendations we were making were consistently at odds with the policy of the state.””
I find it highly undemocratic to silence data driven science in favor of politics. Let information be our guide. Silencing information to the detriment of the populace is Orwellian.
“Humility is not a tone that DeSantis ever struck. The politicization of the virus was perhaps inevitable in a country as polarized as America has become, but it almost certainly inhibited our ability to have an intelligent discussion about it. “It’s a tragedy,” Bhattacharya told me.”
Bhattacharya was the guy DeSantis called up to justify his policies.
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