The obvious story of Ron DeSantis’s campaign announcement on Twitter was the series of embarrassing technical failures that marred the event. But what DeSantis actually said — at least, when I could hear him — revealed a potentially bigger long-term problem for his campaign: He’s obsessed with all the wrong things.
Throughout the event, DeSantis and Elon Musk talked endlessly about wokeness and its various purported evils — often in language that would be utterly alien to anyone who isn’t saturated in the cultural obsessions of the online right. The word “woke” passed DeSantis’s lips more times than I could count. He relitigated the details of YouTube’s decisions on content management during Covid, claimed Disney “obviously supported” injecting gender ideology in elementary school,” and warned of a (seemingly fictitious) Biden administration plot to “regulate [Bitcoin] out of existence.”
An entire question was devoted to ESG — shorthand for socially conscious investing that considers environmental, social, and governance factors, an approach that has become reviled in certain corners of the right. But most Americans have barely heard of ESG and don’t really care about it. In his answer, DeSantis never even bothered to say what the acronym stood for.
This is not a one-off problem for DeSantis. Last month, the Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a former Republican operative, analyzed DeSantis’s public pronouncements and noticed all the same problems — right down to the yammering on about ESG without telling the audience what it was. This led Miller to compare DeSantis’s campaign to Elizabeth Warren’s in 2020: a huge hit with the educated elites on their side of the aisle, but one that has trouble speaking in a register that connects with the normie voters who decide elections.
As if to prove the point, DeSantis fell into the exact same trap in a Fox News interview immediately following the Twitter event. “The woke mind virus is…
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