DeSantis plays on America's divisions as he readies 2024 campaign
In his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama famously said, “There is not a liberal America or a conservative America. There is the United States of America.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) disagrees.
Preparing for a potential 2024 presidential campaign, DeSantis has delivered three notable speeches this year: his second inaugural address; a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum; and, most recently, his State of the State address.
What has emerged is a message of red-state (mostly Floridian) primacy and blue-state inferiority, of what he describes as Florida’s culture of freedom and anti-wokeness contrasted with failing leftist governance in blue states and the threat to freedom from a “biomedical security state” imposed by Washington.
If Obama’s rhetoric was at best aspirational (the country was already polarized and became even more so during his presidency), DeSantis’s message is confrontational, framed as a conflict that demands to be won outright. Talk of national unity, the currency of many successful presidential candidates, is fleeting to nonexistent. He revels in the country’s left-right divisions rather than offering a path out of them.
https://wapo.st/3YV3WDD
Ron DeFascist.
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