A helpful read, to accompany your morning coffee. In my opinion, the content shows why #DeathSantis is likely to crash well before the 2024 Republican National Convention.
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“DON’T CALL IT A CAMPAIGN BOOK “
“The book rollout is taking full advantage of DeSantis’s relationship with the RUPERT MURDOCH media empire. The book is published by HarperCollins, which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp. The first excerpt, ‘How the Florida blueprint can work for the whole US,’ was published in the NY Post. Two authorized leaks from the book, one about his relationship with Trump and, early this morning, one about a private phone call with former Disney CEO BOB CHAPEK, have been published on the Fox News website.
“And DeSantis started his media tour last night by giving his first interview about the book to Mark Levin, on Fox News’s ‘Life, Liberty & Levin.’ The 40-minute conversation was as friendly and fawning as you’d expect.
“After midnight, The New York Times published a review of the book by Jennifer Szalai, who is, to put it mildly, not impressed.
“Taken together, the Levin interview and the Szalai review perfectly capture how the right and left are greeting the DeSantis 2024 rollout.
“Let’s start with some key insights from the Levin-DeSantis sitdown that help show where DeSantis is headed with his 2024 messaging:
— On why he’s more Midwestern than Floridian: ‘My father’s from western Pennsylvania; my mother’s from northeastern Ohio. So that is like steel country, that is like blue collar salt of the earth. And as you know, Mark, Florida is very eclectic, people kind of come from all over. We do have a culture, and so I grew up in that culture, but really it was kind of those Rust Belt values that raised me.’
— On how staying on offense disorients his media critics: “If you’re not on offense, then you’re basically a sitting duck and you let these people come and just take pot shots at you all the time. … It’s hard for them to keep up with you when you’re constantly doing new things and leading on different issues, and we’ve pretty much kept that pace going throughout my entire tenure as governor.”
— On libertarian critics who object to his meddling in public institutions: “Our K-12 schools are public institutions that are funded by our taxpayers. And so that line of thinking is saying: Even though they’re public institutions, the people that are elected to direct those institutions have no right to get involved if the left is pursuing the agenda. So, basically, we can win every election, and we still lose on all of these different things? That is totally untenable.”
— On the power of federal bureaucrats: “Whoever gets a majority of the Electoral College has the right to impose their agenda through the executive branch, and what they did with President Trump was basically try to nullify the election.”
— On corporate power: “If Wall Street banks will not give a loan to someone — say, in the firearm industry — that’s effectively changing gun rights in America. They are not getting any votes to do that. They are not winning any elections to do that. But they’re bringing power to bear in a way that does affect public policy. So I think you have to look at how the government’s become unmoored from constitutional accountability, but I think you also have to look at all these other institutions that are exercising, effectively, public power.”
“Meanwhile, the review of “The Courage to Be Free” in the Times takes a decidedly more critical approach. Szalai describes the “dull coldness at this book’s core,” mocks the title “with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché,” and sees the governor “trying his best to tiptoe around the Trump dragon.”
“Here are the most memorable lines:
— “[T]he overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”
— “For the most part, ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”
— “Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: ‘What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.’ You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays.”
— “Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is chilling — unfree and scary.”
— “Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as ‘woke’ nonsense cooked up by the ‘corporate media.’ (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.)”
— Politico Playbook Blog, 2/27/2023. (Capitalization in original.)
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