Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign officially began tonight with a Twitter Spaces online launch “conversation” with Elon Musk. It did not work.
Others will discuss this at greater length, perhaps tonight and certainly tomorrow. Many will seek to make more out of this than it is. But others will hand-wave it away as if it didn’t happen, and doesn’t matter at all. It did happen, and it does matter a fair amount, not just because narratives about public figures with powerful enemies tend to solidify quickly, but because the nature of the event’s failure points up weaknesses DeSantis’s campaign will have to address:
(1) Lack of focus. The technical difficulties that delayed the start of the event for a half hour were almost comically predictable (our own Jack Butler predicted it with eerie accuracy) but were not a problem afterward; ignore them. The dead air and tech gremlins are the sorts of things that turn the hairs of comms people white, but they will be forgotten within 24 hours. Much more problematic was the format. A Q&A session only works as an introductory event for a candidate if the questions are so focused as to allow the candidate to hit every policy/cultural beat he wants to hit, i.e., if they’re scripted. This clearly was not, at least in the tight sense of providing a compact narrative. (This is why speeches are standard for a rollout — candidates control the structure and salesmanship of a speech completely.) DeSantis would hit powerful points about his record in Florida and how his vision would scale up to the federal level — but often only ten to 20 minutes apart, with gormless air in between devoted to discussions of esoteric technological issues of interest to absolutely nobody except cryptocurrency speculators. Do you have the time to invest in that? Or the attention span? I do, but I get paid for it.
(2) Lack of spotlight. Following on formatting issues, it is a mistake to dilute DeSantis with two co-hosts AND questions from the audience. Twitter users checking in to hear from the newest Republican presidential candidate about his plan for America instead got to hear VC guy David Sacks blathering ten times as much as his hosting duties called for and cameos from GOP representative Thomas Massie calling in to rhapsodize about how much he enjoys his Tesla. This was not a smart use of time and extremely limited voter attention. Everyone wanted to hear more from DeSantis. A loose chat like this giving guests 25 percent of the airtime shows DeSantis in his least effective light, for the simple reason that he’s not much of a casual conversationalist — a dorm-room bull session with all of the “session” and none of the “bull.”
(3) Lack of humor. This brings me to my final point. DeSantis is a fine polemicist, excellent when prosecuting an argument seriously and substantively. I have not yet detected even the slightest hint of a sense of humor within him, however, and this is a known problem of his that came to the fore tonight. I have an immense (nearly unending) appetite for astringently serious policy discussion and substantive debate. I am also a notable outlier. That is all we got tonight. I don’t know if DeSantis knows how to tell a joke, or even improvise a quick one-liner, and I’ll confess at this point that I’m afraid to see him try. It will matter in the long run, because voters are human, and humans are social creatures in the aggregate.
There will be a wild rush by all the usual suspects — Trump operatives and social-media influencers, Biden Democrats, the media — to paint this as some sort of fatal blow, like the DeSantis campaign came into the world stillborn. That’s nonsense: Anyone who suggests as much to you is either emotionally unbalanced or selling you a narrative with ulterior motives. It is instead a missed opportunity. The problem is that DeSantis’s campaign will not receive many opportunities better than this from here on out, unless they go and manufacture them on their own.