Sans Trump, the Republican presidential debates of 2023 have mostly been piddling contests in a shallow pool. We’ve seen nasty insults — most aimed at or directed by Vivek Ramaswamy — and that’s fun to watch. But you can catch those bits on social media and the rest hasn’t been worth tuning in for.
Maybe the problem isn’t just the lack of the Big Orange on stage. Maybe it’s just that the TV debate format doesn’t really work in the internet age. It’s never a battle of compelling ideas. It’s a clash of off-putting egos, each looking to land the big viral moment.
DeSantis is just hard to like: he lacks Trump’s sense of humor. He’s just too serious in a time when all everyone wants is online LOLs
Take last night’s experiment on Fox News. Desperate for a good showdown, the network pitched Governor Gavin Newsom of California against Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida for “The Great Red vs Blue State debate.”
It was quite an interesting idea. Ron, the failing GOP presidential candidate, vs. Gav, the Democrat hoping Joe Biden might retire or die so that he can breeze past Vice President Kamala Harris and into the White House. Florida vs. California: two huge and sunny states. Two very different American futures.
The debate could have been a great PR moment for DeSantis: a chance for him to show why he’s running for president, since his record as a conservative governor of Florida has been demonstrably more successful than decades of disastrous Democratic leadership in California.
Instead, we got a glimpse of why, for all his strengths, DeSantis is not quite presidential material. What exactly presidential material means in the age of Trump-Biden is a difficult question to answer. But Ron just appears not to have it.
DeSantis won the debate, overall, with superior firepower. He was aggressive and made lots of good points about “slick and slippery” Newsom’s flaws as a “lockdown governor” and more. Sean Hannity rather unfairly tilted the debate in DeSantis’s favor by not hiding his obvious loathing for Newsom.
But DeSantis is just hard to like: he lacks Trump’s sense of humor. He’s just too serious in a time when all everyone wants is online LOLs.
Newsom, by contrast, was just about slick and slippery enough to get through the evening with his reputation intact and may even have raised his standing among Democrats and independents.
Newsom had perhaps the best put-down of the night: “You’re trying to out-Trump Trump,” he said. “How’s that going for you, Ron? You’re down forty-one points in your own state!”
It was a messy, low-bar shouting match. At one point DeSantis held up an image-chart of recorded outdoor human feces in San Francisco: that’s his idea of funny, perhaps. And of course the disgusting state of one of America’s great cities is an important point.
But if this was the future, if these two are the post Trump-Biden figureheads of US politics, then Americans may have more reason to despair. The two-man governor versus governor format is better than a panel of bickering no-hopers. But Lincoln-Douglas this was not.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
