DeSantis: The Nation’s Gain is Florida’s Loss

A column in the Washington Post picks up on a theme I made in a recent post: Ron DeSantis did great damage to the state of Florida as he pursued his national ambitions and pandered to Christofascists and white supremacists.  Now that his presidential campaign is ended, the nation has dodged a bullet - assuming Trump is defeated - but Florida is stuck with two more years of DeSantis' misrule.  One has to wonder how much more damage DeSantis will do to his state now that he has been rejected by both the MAGA base of the GOP and too many "moderate" Republicans to the extent they still exist.   Here are column highlights:

Ron DeSantis and his money-firepit of a presidential campaign didn’t even make it as far as the New Hampshire primary. Somewhere, in some magic kingdom, Mickey Mouse must be laughing.

As Florida’s governor, you will recall, DeSantis has waged a ridiculous war against his state’s biggest tourist attraction, Walt Disney World, to show Republican voters how pugnacious and “anti-woke” he is. That is his idea — his only idea, really — of a winning political message. His state, DeSantis loves to tell crowds, is “where woke goes to die.”

His candidacy died pretty much everywhere. . . . . He dropped out Sunday after reportedly deciding that a likely distant third-place finish Tuesday in New Hampshire, behind Trump and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, would further damage his political “brand.” That’s rich, given the way DeSantis has used his office not as an opportunity to serve the people of Florida but as a branding exercise. In positioning himself as the cowboy-booted crusader of anti-wokeness, he did real damage to his state and its institutions.

DeSantis launched his senseless fight against Disney, which has more than 80,000 employees in Florida, after the company criticized his “don’t say gay” legislation barring discussion of sexual identity in public schools. Rather than simply ignore a news release that hardly anyone would have noticed, DeSantis sought to punish Disney for daring to speak out.

His attempt to pander to the GOP base on social issues went far beyond “don’t say gay,” however. The Stop Woke Act that he pushed through the GOP-controlled legislature bars teachers in the public schools from teaching critical race theory — which was not being taught to begin with — and ends all DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs in Florida’s public universities. It also seeks to restrict diversity training by private employers in the state. . . . That law is tied up in another legal battle after a federal judge blocked it and DeSantis appealed.

All this posturing has real-world impacts. Florida school districts are having trouble hiring and retaining teachers, and Florida’s state colleges, including the flagship University of Florida, are losing prized faculty members. Ultimately, it is Florida’s students who suffer for DeSantis’s ambition.

On abortion, DeSantis apparently decided not to let any potential GOP candidate outflank him on the right. Having already signed a 15-week ban into law, he went further and had the legislature pass a pitiless six-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

The good news is that Florida voters might have the final word in November. Activists say they now have enough signatures to place a measure enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution on the ballot. If the DeSantis administration fails to torpedo the ballot initiative, and if Florida follows the pattern of other states, having abortion at issue will likely boost Democratic turnout and cause problems for Republicans up and down the ballot. DeSantis’s effort to leverage reproductive rights for political gain will have been counterproductive.

Just like his whole campaign.

The nation’s gain is Florida’s loss, sadly. I fear DeSantis will continue using the state as a stage to boost his MAGA profile — just like those awfully high heels on his cowboy boots.