Isn’t Ron DeSantis just the worst for being personable to strangers?
If there’s one thing I hate about election season; it can turn someone who is generally well-liked into the rise of Satan McHitlerson. The amount of pearl-clutching that goes on when a candidate so much as breaths out of the wrong nostril becomes irredeemably annoying.
Every Republican candidate goes through this at some point but some definitely get it more than others. Donald Trump can’t open his mouth to sound out a vowel without the left declaring it the most egregious use of the letter “i” ever in recorded history.
Now, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going through this, and what makes it worse is that we still haven’t hit the primaries so a lot of the hate is coming from either the left or other Republican camps, namely Trump’s.
The thing is, I 100 percent expect this to be a thing between Republicans before and during the primaries. Barbs are going to be traded, names will be called, and pointing out weaknesses is as natural as breathing during these times. This is politics. It’s not a friendly contest, it’s a gladiatorial game and the prize for winning this game is nothing less than the leadership of the free world.
But there is a line where the ridicule becomes over the top, and taking it seriously becomes really hard to do. When this ridicule is constant, it has the opposite effect and only makes me like the person being ridiculed more. A perfect example is this clip of DeSantis going into a diner, greeting strangers within it, and getting into a conversation with a couple of gents at a booth.
For all intents and purposes, it’s relatively innocuous. It definitely has all the flavor of a politician being a politician, but other than that, I didn’t truly see anything off about it.
Of course…if you were to ask DeSantis’s detractors, this is the most painful thing to watch in the world. You’d think by the way they’re talking that it’d be less cringe-worthy to watch a 24-hour marathon of Joe Biden and John Fetterman speeches back to back.
People keep making this out to be weird or plastic but I’m not seeing how this is anything but pretty normal. pic.twitter.com/W3fG2QiGX7
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) May 22, 2023
I can tell you that if a lot of people are this adamant to make DeSantis look bad and this clip is what they cling to…then he must actually be pretty great. In fact, just looking at the mainstream media’s treatment of DeSantis, I’d say that they fear this guy unlike any other and that’s a pretty solid case for him alone.
(READ: TIME Piece on Ron DeSantis Includes Hilarious Cover-Art but Only Manages to Make Him Seem More Based)
TIME's new cover: What Ron DeSantis means for America. @mollyesque reports https://t.co/COKSOQA04W pic.twitter.com/ZH8TqHMPVT
— TIME (@TIME) May 18, 2023
And what makes it even worse is that for all intents and purposes, DeSantis just seems like a normal guy. Even his decisions from office seem incredibly normal as they’re the actions that many an American would take if they had the ability to.
If I was Governor of Texas, I’d divest the state from ESG initiatives, attack DEI programs, and smack Disney around for daring to play politics with people’s children. Like DeSantis, I’d have freed my state from COVID lockdown rules pretty early and been so aggressive against the social justice push into schools that “days since woke teachers took an L” would never leave “0.”
Moreover, if I was in his situation and I popped into a diner where strangers were watching my every move and I was trying to be friendly, I’m not sure I’d do much differently and neither would most other people.
But let’s play along with the anti-DeSantis crowd. Let’s say that DeSantis truly was an impersonal person and that was fully on display here. Let’s say that his stop at this NH diner truly was him putting on a politician’s face and meeting and greeting people when he didn’t want to, thus causing his interactions to look fake and forced.
So what?
It’s my personal opinion that we put way too much worth on the idea that a politician is someone you should be able to sit down and have a beer with. I don’t care if I feel like I could carry on a conversation with the guy like he was my best friend all along and I didn’t even know it. What I care about is whether or not he’s a good leader.
Judging by Florida, Ron DeSantis is a good leader and so long as he keeps up making Florida a really great place, I’m not going to be convinced differently.
But so far, what I’m seeing is just a very busy leader doing what very busy leaders running for office do. If you’re trying to make people hate him, then this isn’t going to help. It didn’t and currently isn’t working against Trump and it won’t work against DeSantis either.
