Ron DeSantis’s strategic ambiguity

Ron DeSantis may not have announced his presidential bid, but no one seems to be in any doubt that he will do so eventually. This week amounted to a significant stepping stone towards that moment for the Florida governor. His book was published Monday, soaring to the top of the bestseller lists and — perhaps more importantly — providing DeSantis with an excuse to leave his “Free State of Florida” and spend some time in the rest of the country.

Today, DeSantis is at a donor gathering in Houston. Tomorrow he will be in Dallas, on Sunday he will deliver remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Los Angeles and, while he’s in the area, swing by a local Republican event in Orange County. Think of this week, then, as a soft launch for DeSantis 2024.

But even as DeSantis gets closer to announcing, and even after the publication of his book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Rival, there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to how DeSantis will position himself on a series of big ideological questions. On some issues, everyone knows what DeSantis thinks. If there are two pillars to his brand, they are his Covid-era impulse to keep his state open and an aggressive “war on woke” that takes the form of dust-ups with Disney, attacks on ESG, fights over books in schools and much else.

Unsurprisingly, these are all areas where the Republican Party, and Republican primary voters, are on the same page, broadly speaking. But on more contested questions, DeSantis has been far more guarded. On everything from economics to foreign policy, strategic ambiguity rules the day. Generally speaking, he is reluctant to go out on a limb. In his answers to questions on issues that are more divisive within the GOP, he seems to seek out the point of maximum consensus, or flip a request for a substantive policy position into rebuttal of a Democratic talking point.

A prominent example of this came recently when he was asked about Ukraine and, as I pointed out at the time, offered up a hedge clearly designed to annoy the smallest possible number of Republicans. In The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis largely declines the opportunity to put flesh on the bone in these more controversial areas, be it foreign policy or domestic.

This is smart politics until it isn’t. It’s one thing for DeSantis to be prudent in staking out an ideological position ahead of the primary. And he will, of course, prefer to talk about the areas of GOP consensus where he has emerged as a national leader than wade into thornier questions. But judiciousness about what you do and don’t say can quickly become evasiveness, fence-sitting and dithering.

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Axios reports that Donald Trump will attack DeSantis from the economic left, highlighting past comments and votes on Social Security and Medicare and painting him as a lackey of Paul Ryan. As one Trump confidant explained to Axios: “There’s a pre-Trump Ron and there’s a post-Trump Ron. He used to be a Reagan Republican. That’s where he comes from. He’s now awkwardly trying to square his views up with the populist nationalist feeling of that party.”

This strikes me as a potentially productive approach from the former president, not necessarily because of the ideological differences he hopes to demonstrate, but because it makes his opponent look like less of a leader and more of a follower; less like someone making the political weather, and more like an unprincipled weathervane.

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AOC’s Met mistake The nonpartisan House Ethics Committee released a report Thursday after investigating whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broke congressional rules after being slow to reimburse vendors for her “Tax the Rich” dress and other expenses relating to her attendance of the 2021 Met Gala. In the report, the Office of Congressional Ethics found “substantial reason to believe that she accepted impermissible gifts” and advised further investigation.

Biden calls rivals’ bluff How does a vulnerable incumbent minimize dissent? By recruiting potential rivals to his own advisory board. That’s exactly what Joe Biden has done, asking twenty prominent Democrats to join a “national advisory board” expected to campaign for him ahead of a re-election bid next year.

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Biden’s return to form on crime

Once upon a time, Joe Biden was something of a tough-on-crime Democrat. He was a famous sponsor of the 1994 crime bill, and gave a speech in defense of it on the Senate floor where he compared himself to Richard Nixon and declared “lock the SOBs up.” (Cue Hunter flinching.) Following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Biden drafted a counterterrorism bill that was opposed by some Republicans on civil liberties grounds. In 2002, that legislation was a major inspiration for the PATRIOT Act.

All this posed a problem when Biden began seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. His party had long ago stopped worrying about street muggings and started worrying about over-incarceration. And as George Floyd was killed, as cries to “Defund the Police” reached a pitch, Biden began to cave. Incredibly, in October 2020, he called the crime bill, a major part of his senatorial legacy, a “mistake.”

Yet once again the circumstances of politics have proven fickle. Since 2020, crime has spiked in cities across the country, which Republicans in the midterms turned to their political advantage, especially in New York. It’s against this backdrop that Biden announced today that he won’t veto an effort by Congress to override a local Washington, DC bill, which would have abolished some mandatory minimums and reduced criminal penalties. That legislation shows a DC City Council drunk on ideology, putting their leftism before public safety. And Biden apparently isn’t willing to go there.

Biden’s non-veto meets the political moment, certainly, but it’s also a return to form. The president has spent much of the last year running away from his party’s weak-on-crime wing, culminating in a State of the Union address where he explicitly rejected defunding the police. Progressives are naturally foaming, with multiple Squad members denouncing the intervention in DC affairs. But they’re also on the losing side of a debate on crime within the Democratic Party, one that no doubt has Biden, quite implausibly, feeling young again.

–Matt Purple

CPAC to the future

For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference has made waves for Republican Party news and for Republican parties news, whether real or completely fabricated. This year, with a heavy heart Cockburn reports that while MAGA celebrities like Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Brick Suit and Kari Lake showed up, the CPAC attendees were not as out in as full a force as previous years. CPAC made its return to the nation’s capital, after its coronavirus-induced exile to Florida, but it wasn’t exactly triumphant. Crowds were less rowdy, and less crowded, than they’ve been in years.

Cockburn set out to figure out why this was the case — reasons ranged from the “crotch-pummeling” allegations against CPAC head Matt Schlapp to how the Turning Point USA conference is quickly turning into the place for Republican parties. Fox News, which used to be ever present with a sprawling studio set-up on scene, for example, was noticeably absent. In its stead, Newsmax, Rumble and various local and national talk radio booths dominated media row.

–Cockburn