We've seen disastrous rollouts before. The botched ACA-website rollout, during Obama's presidency, may be one of the most famous historical examples. And now we can add Ron DeSantis to that history: his attempt to come out and announce his run for president in 2024 was, according to all accounts, a catastrophe, with Donald Trump's campaign explicitly using that very word. Trump went on to crow in a Truth Social post that DeSantis's entire campaign was going to be a catastrophe. The Biden campaign took subtle jabs as well (none written by Biden himself, I'm sure), and GOP governor Asa Hutchinson created a donation page, with a clickable link to contribute funds, that was annotated, "Like my policies, this link works." Snark was all around, and it came from both sides of the aisle.
I think we can all agree that the awkward rollout was not DeSantis's shining moment. From the above-linked NYT article:
The mix of 26 minutes of mostly dead air, followed by an intermittent celebration of Mr. Musk, made the livestream feel “a bit like an ad for Twitter,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump administration official who has turned sharply against Mr. Trump, wrote on Twitter. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally, called his governor “DeSedative.”
As I said in a commented response to someone else, I can see how all of this might be frustrating for DeSantis, but since all of this glitchiness was Twitter's fault, I think Elon Musk ought to be embarrassed. He fucked up what should have been a pretty standard announcement. Twitter was supposed to be, for DeSantis, a privileged platform acting as a megaphone to an audience of millions. Musk owes the DeSantis campaign an apology.
DeSantis's announcement took the form of a livestream on a new branch of Twitter called Twitter Spaces. Elon Musk has been aggressively expanding Twitter's platform capabilities, turning it from a mere microblogging site to a more versatile jumping-off point for podcasting and other longer-form media. I suppose it's only natural, then, that Twitter Spaces might be glitchy given its relative youth. The DeSantis team, in using Spaces, gambled and lost, and this failure for Musk feels a bit like Musk's disastrous rollout of that Tesla Cybertruck.
Well, all we can do is move on from here. DeSantis is way behind in the GOP polls. Last I heard, he's got somewhere around a 40 percentage-point gap with Trump (roughly 60% to 20% nationwide). Tripping over one's dick right at the outset isn't a good look, but I recall there being plenty of mockery in 2015 when Trump dramatically descended an escalator at Trump Tower to announce his own candidacy, with some writers taking special note of the fact that Trump descended (condescended?) to make his announcement. Somehow, Trump moved past the bad optics to win the presidency. A stumble doesn't have to be the last word for a campaign. So I fully expect DeSantis to dust himself off and move on. What I want to see from him, though, is a clear listing of his priorities for the nation. I doubt they'll be much different from Trump's: work on the border hemorrhage; improve the economy; restore America's international clout; rescue the US dollar from its current downward spiral; scour wokeness out of sports, education, and all of our institutions, etc.
May the rest of DeSantis's campaign be stumble-free. I'll give the last word to Vivek Ramaswamy, whom the NY Times quotes:
“Challenge to the GOP field,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter. “No pre-written speeches. No teleprompters. No pre-scripted interviews. That’ll be good for authenticity, good for America. I promise to abide.”
If DeSantis can show the nation a level of authenticity, he can recover from this stumble.
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