Ron DeSantis’ new book offers a powerful warning to the US electorate

[signalmankenneth]

CNN —
As is increasingly apparent in many of his public appearances, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is rather like Donald Trump, only without the charm. And that charmless demeanor seeps through his latest book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” a grievance-laden tome written in advance of a presumed bid for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

The question is, will it help his chances?

That’s unlikely. Only fans or parties actively looking for someone to back in 2024 will read the book, and within a few months unsold copies will lie on the remainder tables, rubbing shoulders with Mike Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” or past examples of campaign self-advertisements such as “A Call to Service” by John Kerry, “A Time for Truth” by Ted Cruz or even Trump’s “Crippled America.”

I’ve read a number of these books and they’re rarely good. Nevertheless, DeSantis takes the usual dullness to a fresh level, redefining what cliched writing can sound like. It’s one thing to offer the public a bit of wooden prose, but DeSantis gives us an entire lumber yard.

I don’t blame DeSantis entirely for that lousy prose. Like most politicians, he’s a busy man who will have likely farmed out the writing of his book to nameless minions. The governor doubtless talked at length to the “hardworking team of literary professionals” mentioned in his acknowledgments; these ghostwriters will have also had his speeches, social media feeds, appearances and policy papers to draw on.

And we can be sure the governor read the book and approved of its contents before publication. So we must assume the ideas (and “ideals”) in this book, such as they are, belong to him.
That’s not a good thing.

As one might expect, the book runs through DeSantis’ life and times, talking about his love of baseball and hard work; about his parents and their working-class roots in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were Italian-Americans — a family of immigrants, although DeSantis has shown little interest in helping recently-arrived migrants on their American journey: he famously flew two planeloads, primarily comprised of Venezuelan migrants, from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022, a cruel, calculated political stunt designed to embarrass the Biden administration and liberal elites with their “sanctuary cities.”

That he would play politics with the lives of these poor souls doesn’t, I fear, speak well for him – nor that he performed throughout the ensuing media cycle with such glee.

But this hard-heartedness is a core part and parcel of the narrative, which offers a litany of resentfulness. “Before my time at Yale,” DeSantis writes of his undergraduate years studying history at the Ivy League school, “I had never seen a limousine, much less a limousine liberal. Those students who were the most strident in their leftism… came from the most privileged background.” He experienced “unbridled leftism” on campus, and this pushed him far to the right, where he has remained.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/opini...ini/index.html