The Ron DeSantis Challenge The Florida Governor has a strong record. Can he offer voters a larger national vision?
The unfortunate political reality today is that the U.S. is marching toward a 2024 rematch between two aging Presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that most Americans say they don’t want. This great country can do better, but it’s up to voters to spare us from the divisive oldsters who desperately need each other to win a second term.
At least for now, the Democratic Party is defaulting to 80-year-old President Biden. But even most Democrats prefer a new nominee, and nearly 30% are making that point by telling pollsters they support the vanity candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson. It’s not far-fetched that Mr. Biden will decide not to run, or that some serious candidate might challenge the President if there’s a deep recession, or he shows even more noticeable physical or mental decline.
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Republicans are at least getting a better choice as a variety of candidates enter the presidential race. They all have their merits and deserve a hearing as the campaign unfolds. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined the fray on Wednesday and, judging by the polls and his financial backing to date, he is the biggest threat to Mr. Trump.
The 44-year-old has an impressive resume: son of middle-class parents, Yale baseball captain, Harvard law school, Navy veteran including a tour in Iraq, and a three-term Member of Congress. But he has made his mark politically with his record as the two-term Governor of booming Florida.
His legislative record is as impressive as you’ll find, including near-universal school choice, $3.3 billion for Everglades restoration, tort and insurance reform, paycheck protection for workers in public unions, tax cuts, insisting on free speech in higher education and resisting woke ideology.
His greatest achievement was his handling of the pandemic. After the initial panic and shutdowns driven by President Trump and Anthony Fauci in Washington, Mr. DeSantis did his own homework on Covid health risks and the costs of economic and school lockdowns.
This wasn’t easy given media conformity and the public mood at the time. New York’s Andrew Cuomo was hailed as a national hero for his onerous lockdowns and fighting with Mr. Trump. Mr. DeSantis decided to reopen the schools in 2020 and had to fight lawsuits to do so. He was among the first governors to reopen his state’s economy, and Florida became a mecca for tens of thousands who wanted a refuge from lockdown isolation. For breaking from Covid orthodoxy, he was maligned in the press as the “angel of death.”
This is a sharp contrast with Mr. Trump, who indulged the lockdown lobby for months, kept Dr. Fauci on the job through the end of his term, and shot from the lip on treatments and other controversies that undermined public confidence. This gave Mr. Biden the opening to defeat him in 2020.
The acid test of leadership is how someone responds in a crisis, and Mr. DeSantis showed both the discipline to master the subject and the courage to defy elite opinion for the larger public good.
Mr. DeSantis’s record is undeniably conservative, and some critics fear it may be too far right to win a national election. Mr. Trump seems to think so as he is attacking the Governor from the left on Social Security, abortion for Florida’s six-week ban, and the fight over Disney’s special Florida privileges.
But Mr. DeSantis won re-election in 2020 by 19 points in a state that has traditionally been a nail-biter. He won Hispanic counties and others that traditionally vote Democratic. Mr. Trump hasn’t won anything for himself or the rest of his party since his inside electoral straight in 2016.
A more serious concern for many is Mr. DeSantis’s fence-straddling on Ukraine and Russia. He indulged a former Fox News host by calling the war a “territorial dispute,” though he later said the phrase was misunderstood.
But Mr. DeSantis hasn’t clarified his larger foreign-policy views, and the worry is that he will make the mistake of chasing Mr. Trump in retreating from U.S. global commitments. Mr. DeSantis will need to explain how he defines being a foreign policy “Jacksonian” in an increasingly dangerous world.
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The other rap against Mr. DeSantis is that he’s a cultural brawler more than a likable unifier. There’s truth to this. He’s no backslapper, and he’d benefit from even a little of Ronald Reagan’s self-deprecating humor. The best candidates for President campaign with some poetry and optimism as well as policy grit and personal toughness.
The Governor will also need a larger vision for America beyond his Florida success—not least how he’d lift the economy out of stagflation and the country out of its angry divisions. Mr. Biden promised to do the latter but has made his Presidency hostage to the Bernie Sanders left. Mr. Trump is promising a politics of “retribution,” which means four more years of national trench warfare.
Mr. Biden’s failures mean there’s an opportunity for Republicans to offer voters a better vision of national renewal. The country needs it, Americans want it, and the opening is there if a GOP candidate can seize the moment.
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