Michael Hiltzik: The only thing voters liked less than Ron DeSantis' anti-woke crusade was Ron DeSantis
Sunday was a tough day for those, like me, who get their entertainment jollies by watching losers try to redeem themselves. I'm not talking only about the Buffalo Bills, the only NFL team I care even two cents for, whose effort to erase their four consecutive Super Bowl losses (1990-1993) was defeated by the Kansas City Chiefs.
Even more crushing, I am forced to bid farewell to the Ron DeSantis for President campaign.
The theme of the postmortems that started appearing in the political press almost instantaneously after DeSantis' announcement that he was withdrawing from the quest for the Republican nomination was that his campaign's recklessness was matched by its fecklessness.
That's true enough, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. The DeSantis campaign exposed the vacuum at the heart of Republican policymaking, which is that it doesn't involve policymaking at all, only the ceaseless repetition of grievances against fabricated enemies — teachers, librarians, doctors, transgender individuals, advocates of social inclusion-equity-diversity — accompanied by performative viciousness.
The campaign also exposed the vacuum in our political press corps, which tried valiantly to prop up the Florida governor as a doughty maverick who shouldn't be underestimated. than with progressive critics.")
