XPost: alt.politics.democrats, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns
XPost: sac.politics

The worst-kept secret in American politics is out: Ron DeSantis is running
for president. For months, the governor of Florida has been eyeing up the opportunity of running as the Republican nominee. He has done all of the
things you need to do – including a trip to the UK last month. He has also
sat it out quietly as his main rival – Donald J Trump – has taken potshots
at him.

It was an unenviable position for a putative candidate to have been in.
Most polls show Trump way ahead of the other candidates among Republican voters. Despite – or because of – his legal troubles, he has settled at
around twice the polling of his nearest rival. A poll this week showed
Trump as first choice for 53 per cent of Republican-leaning voters and
DeSantis at 26 per cent. Other contenders linger on single digits.

Some have taken such polls to suggest that Trump is unassailable. But all
of them were taken before DeSantis was actually running. Now he has
declared his candidacy, several things will happen. The first is that the Left’s attacks on him will heat up. This week Vanity Fair headlined a
piece to suggest that DeSantis would happily share a platform with neo-
Nazi sympathisers to launch his campaign. He should expect more of this,
and it won’t hurt him at all on his own side. Republican voters have been through – and seen through – political hit jobs of this kind for years
now.

The second thing is that DeSantis now has the opportunity to lay out what
he would do in the Oval office. At this week’s online Twitter launch with
Elon Musk, the governor managed to get into detailed policy as well as
broad direction of travel announcements. But the third thing is that now DeSantis can – and should – respond to Trump’s barrage against him.

For months, Trump has been attacking DeSantis by trying out nicknames on
him (the most inane being “Ron DeSanctimonious”, which doesn’t even fit
the target). He has also started to try to criticise DeSantis’s record.

This is an unwise move. As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a
massive amount of growth in his state. Florida has become the number one destination in America for people fleeing Democrat-run, crime-ridden
cities. During Covid, DeSantis took the bold decision to avoid locking
down and was proved right. Furthermore, he has not only picked culture war battles but has also won them.

As a result, when DeSantis was asked about Trump’s recent attacks on him yesterday, he had the chance to point out that it is strange to be
attacked by Trump from his Left. In an open debate between Trump and
DeSantis, the former may revert to his bully-boy tactics, but the latter
has achievements to run on.

In any case, all this means that the Republican primary has become
interesting. The party now has an opportunity to have meaningful policy
and direction-of-travel discussions – not least the question of whether
the party wants to keep looking back to the 2020 election (which Trump
still claims to have won) or forward to actually winning the next
election.

It is a healthy position for a party to be in. The vibrancy of the debate within the American Right might be fruitfully contrasted with the lack of anything similar among their British counterparts.

But the bigger comparison is with the state of the Democrat party.

Last month Joe Biden released a video announcing his plan to run for re- election in 2024. The 80-year-old president is already the oldest man to
have held that office, and it is not a reflection on everyone his age
simply to note that Biden does not always seem to be up to the job. Though
his vice-president, Kamala Harris, appeared in the launch video, she did
not speak. The clear intimation was that Harris just could not be unstuck
from the ticket so may as well stay along for the ride.

The only Democrat to have announced that they wish to challenge Biden is
Robert F Kennedy Jr. In some polls he has been as close to Biden for the Democrat nomination as DeSantis is to Trump. But Kennedy is an outlier,
someone who has picked up a certain amount of notice not just because of America’s love of dynastic politics, or his own often idiosyncratic views,
but because nobody in the true mainstream of the party is challenging
Biden.

In part that is because to try to kill the king at this moment would be
seen as an act of lèse-majesté within the party. The assassin would not be rewarded. But the bigger problem for the Democrats is that, if you get rid
of Biden, you have to jump down a generation from those who have held the
party in their grip for so long.

As Americans have been reminded from seeing Senator Dianne Feinstein
wheeled into the chamber at the age of 89, the Democrats have a
generational problem. Biden, Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and others have
controlled their party for a long time – too long for its own good. One
result of this is that, while the Republicans can go down a generation and
find plenty of talent (not least DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and Governor
Glenn Youngkin), the Democrats have a talent drought.

Nothing seems to grow below Biden. There was a time when Secretary of
State Anthony Blinken was talked about as a successor. But the American electorate have hardly seen Blinken for the past two and a half years. Any foreign policy credit that can be picked up – and there is precious little
of it – has been picked up by the president.

Just about the only name being bandied about to take up the Democrat
mantle is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. By contrast with
DeSantis in Florida, Newsom presides over a state where 1 per cent of the population were chased out in a single year. They are leaving the state
not just because of the high tax burden but because of the disintegration
of the cities.

Newsom managed to ruin San Francisco as mayor before trying the same
policies on a state-wide canvas as governor. He may be one of the only talked-about successors to Biden, but he would be the most talked-about candidate imaginable for the Republicans. If Newsom ever runs for the presidency, you can expect plenty of Republican commercials focusing on
any one of his state’s filthy, zombie-ridden, crime-infested and tent-
encamped streets.

As things stand, there is a significant ideas battle going on across the American Right and none at all on the American Left. Biden ran as a
unifying moderate, but has governed as an anti-Republican – specifically
an anti-Trump – Leftist. The Democrats who exist under him seem to spend
most of their time trying to both pander to, and not get destroyed by, the extremists on their own side.

Newsom himself recently set up a taskforce to look into the paying of reparations to descendants of slaves in California. The group came back
with a recommendation that billions of dollars should be paid to black Americans in the state for such crimes as “overpolicing”. Even Newsom has
had to distance himself from the monster he created.

He, Biden and other Democrats are hoping that the Republicans run Donald
Trump as their candidate in 2024, so that they can spend their campaign
simply pointing at him and reminding voters that they are not Trump.

But if the Republicans choose wisely and well, the Democrats could yet be robbed of that opportunity and the one reason they have to ask the public
to return them to office.

https://news.yahoo.com/joe-biden-democrats-talentless-extreme-
191650839.html

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