In one of his rare sit-down interviews, President Biden was asked last week about an NBC poll showing that an unprecedented 71% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Biden’s response? “Polls don’t matter anymore.”
Why is the country so divided?
Biden, two years into a presidency in which he has demonized his opponents as semi-fascists,” “ultra MAGA” and “white supremacists,” blamed Donald Trump.
“There was a deliberate effort by the last guy to play on people’s fears . . .
“It’s gotten too mean, it’s gotten too personal, gotten too divisive.”
He’s right on the last point. People are sick of the double-speak and pure venom coming out of the White House. That’s where the meanness and divisiveness is.
And that’s not even mentioning the border, inflation, woke agenda and other disasters of this administration.
Yet Biden seems intent on running for a second term, which he would begin as a cognitively challenged 82-year-old.
Dems remain saddled
For all the cheerleading of his pet MSNBC historian Michael Beschloss and other media toadies after the State of the Union, there’s no hiding that the Democratic Party is caught in a hellish predicament of its own making.
The president is a liability who may not make it to the end of this term, let alone be in any shape for an encore. His heir apparent, Kamala Harris, is unelectable, mainly due to the fact that whenever she is seen in public her speeches are so vacuous and punctuated by weird cackles that she seems high. But because she is a “woman of color,” then good luck pushing her aside.
By contrast, the Republican Party is sitting pretty for 2024, in direct contravention of the media narrative.
They have a deep bench of talent willing to compete with Donald Trump, the only declared candidate.
The standout best is the Generation X governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who has shown what can be achieved in a short time by a good Republican administration with courage, competence and a moral compass.
While DeSantis, 44, is coy about his ambitions, he has a book out at the end of the month which is a blatant campaign starter: “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”
The blurb describes it as “a winning blueprint for patriots across the country.”
A working-class Catholic, born and raised in Florida, DeSantis graduated with honors from Yale and Harvard Law School, served as an officer in the US Navy and as adviser to a SEAL commander in Iraq, earning a Bronze Star.
Fleshing out this central-casting résumé are his admirable wife and three cute kids. Casey DeSantis is a beautiful Emmy Award-winning former TV host whose praise for her husband’s support through her battle with breast cancer was a secret weapon in his 2022 campaign.
In a disappointing midterm landscape, DeSantis’ thumping victory in Florida was a shining light. He won by 1.5 million votes, nearly 20% of the vote margin, the highest of any Republican governor candidate in the history of Florida, now the nation’s fastest growing state.
Ron chooses optimism
As he told a group of influential conservatives in Miami on Saturday night, it wasn’t so pretty in his first gubernatorial election in 2018, when he scraped in by half a percentage point, or about 32,000 votes. He was advised then to govern timidly, to “trim your sails a little bit.”
But DeSantis’ view was: “I may have gotten 50% of the vote [in 2018], but I earned 100% of the executive power and I intend to use it . . . I had an agenda that I had pledged I would pursue, but I also . . . knew successfully implementing that agenda would leave me much higher than 50% in the future.”
And, boy, did he prove that, by doing what he thought was right, even if it bucked public opinion, the electoral dividends would come.
He even won a majority of single women in November, he says, despite tens of millions of dollars spent attacking him over abortion.
“You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions to stand up when it’s not easy. Because when you’re going after the sacred cows of the left, they don’t just take that lying down, they come after you… You’ve got to be willing to stand strong.”
Today, “We have one of the lowest per capita tax burdens of any state in these United States [and] the largest budget surplus in the history of the state . . . I think it’s a lesson that can be replicated in other states and throughout the country.”
It sure looks like a formidable campaign platform.
Trump thinks so, judging by the barbs he’s been throwing at the young gov, dubbing him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” “Meatball Ron” and “Lockdown Ron,” which is amusing since DeSantis recognized before almost anyone that COVID-19 was mainly a threat to the elderly and obese, so he focused on protecting them while setting schools and businesses free. Florida’s performance through the pandemic was second to none, despite its large elderly population.
“We made the decision, we are going to defy the experts, we are not going to allow the state of Florida to descend into some type of Faucian dystopia,” DeSantis said. “Now, this was something that was not necessarily the smart thing to do politically because if you go back to April, May, June 2020, there was mass hysteria . . . I thought maybe it would end up being bad for me. [But now] people revel in the fact that . . . we weren’t listening to people who ended up being wrong.”
Swoon over Miami
The Miami crowd gave DeSantis four standing ovations. One before he took to the stage and one at the end. Another when he spoke about standing up to Disney: “They didn’t like the fact that we were saying no to sexualizing young kids … In the next few weeks I’ll be signing legislation that will finally and permanently remove Disney’s self-governing status in Florida.”
The next came when he talked about “Soros funding and electing prosecutors all across this country to ignore the law and put their own people at risk. We had one in Tampa . . . so I removed him from his post”.
He was just warming up to a Churchillian promise.
“We fight the woke in the corporations, we fight the woke in the halls of the legislature, we fight the woke in the schools and in the universities. We will never surrender to the woke mob. The state of Florida is where woke goes to die.”
The crowd loved it.
They also warmly applauded Trump, who phoned in after DeSantis to remind everyone of his own considerable achievements.
While the rest of the media salivates over the supposed Hobson’s choice facing Republicans in 2024, with Trump leading most polls, albeit with DeSantis nipping at his heels, conservative voters have much cause for optimism.
They have real choice, inspirational, proven and generational choice, rather than the certain oblivion faced by Democrats with their current offerings.