Ron DeSantis is one of the most prominent Republican leaders skipping this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps the Florida governor is choosing instead to prepare for his upcoming visits to key primary states as part of an unofficial tour for his new book, which has the depressingly generic title “The Courage to Be Free.” While DeSantis’ absence from CPAC has made headlines, what’s absent from his book is far more telling. For a man who likes to pick his fights, the ones DeSantis avoids in his book are signposts for Democrats looking for weaknesses.
The least surprising omissions are the ones even DeSantis would probably recognize as politically inconvenient. For example, though he rails against elites helping elites, he doesn’t mention that he’s appointed some 250 donors to political posts. He does not repeat his tweet that “voting is a privilege,” not a right — a tweet he claims he didn’t write. He leaves out his early support for Covid vaccines — Florida’s millionth jab was aired live on “Fox and Friends” — and his later skepticism of such vaccines. (Last summer, Florida was the only state not to preorder vaccines for children under 5 years old.) In discussing his military service as a judge advocate general, he details his deployment to Iraq but not his time at Guantanamo Bay.
Oddly, given DeSantis’ obvious ambitions toward the Oval Office, foreign policy is almost absent from the book. It’s not as if print space was tight: DeSantis spends a dozen pages attacking critical race theory and crowing about a showdown with “60 Minutes” about Florida’s vaccine distribution. But Ukraine is never mentioned, China gets two pages and Russia is only named in the context of investigations into Donald Trump. Even when DeSantis recounts his efforts as a congressman to move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, his only takeaway is that the “so-called experts” who opposed him were wrong. (The…
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