The New Yorker set out to do a hit piece on Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But what we learn from the profile is that DeSantis is smart, serious, hard-working, focused, honest, and apparently incorruptible. He ignores media “noise” and does what he thinks is best for Florida based on analysis of data and science. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood, then attended Yale, where he worked several jobs to pay tuition, and Harvard Law School. He served in the military in Iraq. The main thing the New Yorker hates about DeSantis is his effectiveness and hence the implicit threat he poses to Democrats: “Like Trump with a brain.”
Quotes from the piece:
“He’d read all the medical literature — all of it, not just the abstracts.”
“Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a f**k. . . . Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a f**k. Big donors? He doesn’t give a s**t. Cancels on them all the time.”
“He’s good-looking. . . . His wife is really good-looking. His family is beautiful. They look like they’re from central casting.”
“He’s a serious guy. Driven.”
“He was stubborn. If he set his mind to something, you couldn’t shake him. He was focussed and motivated. He didn’t get that from me.” [This is Ron DeSantis Sr. speaking. DeSantis’s dad opened the door in a Florida State University T-shirt and proceeded to chat amiably about his son’s baseball prowess.]
“Ron was a voracious worker, and he worked at phenomenal speed. He was a superb writer, especially for his age.”
“He’s so f***ing smart and so creative. You couldn’t even plagiarize off his work. He’d take some angle, and everyone knew there was only one person who could have done that.”
“He’s just incredibly disciplined.”
And summations by the author of the piece, Dexter Filkins: “DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence, and a granular understanding of policy.” He’s “articulate and fast on his feet.” He’s “dogged and precise.”
The New Yorker expends a lot of energy trying to make DeSantis’s response to Covid look poor (good luck with that — Florida opened schools in August 2020 and never looked back, preventing the catastrophic learning loss and widespread depression that characterized children in other states) and does a lot of snarking about the way he walks, his self-confidence, the way he ridicules Democratic Party shibboleths, and how he’s supposedly “angry” or personifies the rage of voters or that lots of white people like him. Somehow these last three aspects are never a problem when it comes to Democrats. Also, DeSantis doesn’t like small talk or hand-shaking and he appears on a cable-news channel the New Yorker does not like.