He just doesn’t like people
Hey look, this is an interesting C&P from Hullabaloo. Why is it that those who attack others who appear to be different actually do similar things or are similar? You typically find this out years later. I don’t know . . .
“He just doesn’t like people,” Digby’s Hullabaloo, (digbysblog.net)
He’s Nixon in high heels . . .
Suzy Barker, a native Iowan dressed in an orange-and-blue University of Florida hoodie, waited in a crowd of fellow Republicans on Friday morning to meet Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
She smiled widely and pointed to her hoodie as she told the governor that her son attended college in his home state. Mr. DeSantis — dressed in a dark blue suit with a light blue, open-collar shirt and black boots — stood on the opposite side of 10 metal bike racks separating him from the crowd. He gave a slight nod to Ms. Barker and told her about his state’s new “grandparent waiver” that gives tuition breaks to out-of-state students whose grandparents are Florida residents.
But Ms. Barker, a 50-year-old teacher who had driven about an hour to see the Florida governor in Davenport, does not have any other family in the Sunshine State, and she narrowed her eyes in confusion at his response. Here she was at an event promoting Mr. DeSantis’s new book, shoulder to shoulder with a crush of Iowans eager for face time with the anti-“woke” darling of right-wing America, and he was talking waivers.
Mr. DeSantis quickly scribbled his name with a black Sharpie in her book and smiled. “Go Gators,” he told her as he moved on to the next person awaiting his signature.
The interaction underscored both the promise and the potential pitfall of a presidential bid for Mr. DeSantis. His preference for policy over personality can make him seem awkward and arrogant or otherwise astonishing in person, depending on the voter and the success or failure of his one-on-one exchanges. Many Republicans view his style as an antidote to the character attacks and volatility that have underscored Republican politics during the Trump era.
As Mr. DeSantis decides whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, one of the biggest questions facing the 44-year-old Floridian is his ability to connect with voters who have had little exposure to him outside his home state.
Unlike Florida, where elections are often won or lost on the strength of carefully crafted multimillion-dollar TV ad campaigns, the Republican presidential primary remains front-loaded with contests in states like Iowa where voters value personal interactions.
But Mr. DeSantis has leaned into his reputation as a political brawler, lacking the kind of warmth and charisma that helped lift Bill Clinton, John McCain and other politicians. Mr. DeSantis’s disregard for some of the typical pleasantries of politics can produce some uncomfortable moments.
Earlier this year, he turned off some deep-pocketed donors during a previously unreported meeting when he largely kept to his own corner of the room and showed little interest in interacting with the crowd, according to one person briefed on the meeting.
At a stop in Houston last week to promote his book and help raise money for the Harris County Republican Party, Mr. DeSantis was scheduled to speak to several hundred people who had paid extra money to hear him ahead of a speech to a larger crowd. But Mr. DeSantis spent only a few minutes in the smaller room and never took the stage, irritating some in attendance.
Nixon didn’t like people very much either, or at least didn’t seem to. And he won the presidency twice. So, this is not a deal breaker. On the other hand, the world has changed and this sort of thing will get widely disseminated on social media. We’ll see. Maybe all those first time MAGA voters were always in it for the policy. But I doubt it.
You could suppose that Nixon went into politics & stayed in politics because other influential people wanted him to. Eisenhower didn’t think much of him. Perhaps it is the same way with Desantis. That and ambition & an outsized ego may be all that is necessary.
CA, whence Nixon originated was then & still is the most populous state, and FL is now #3, so that encourages Desantis to chase the brass ring. #2 (TX) gave us the Bushes already – Connecticut just wasn’t big enuf for them. Neither was Maine.
i never met Nixon. Maybe he was a bad guy, but maybe not worse than Obama who enjoyed ordering drones to kill people as long as collateral damage was held to no more than 30 at a time.
in fact Nixon’s foreign polices were enlightened..detente and going to china. maybe the reason he found no friends when they were going to impeach him. but he was way smarter and less evil than DeSantis or even Trump.
One can almost imagine Desantis as Trump’s running-mate next year, except that they hate each other’s guts evidently. That and the Constitution at least implies that both P & VP cannot be from the same state. Maybe Trump would be welcome in NJ, since he certainly would not be welcomed back to NY.
“the Constitution at least implies that both P & VP cannot be from the same state”
You made me look it up and the words you misinterpreted are new to me, but still… hogwash.
What was mininterpreted?
Cheney Avoids Residential Crisis
AP – Dec 8, 2000
NEW ORLEANS — Dick Cheney is a Wyoming resident and therefore would be constitutionally qualified to serve as George W. Bush’s vice president, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The ruling came from the bench after an hourlong hearing in which lawyers for three Texas residents argued that Cheney had moved to Bush’s home state of Texas when he took a job there in 1993.
The 12th Amendment of the Constitution says that if the presidential and vice presidential candidates reside in the same state, then that state’s electors cannot vote for each of them. …
The 12th Amendment says that Electors cannot vote for candidates both from the same state. It also says that both must be from the same party, i.e. nominated on the same ticket.
When John Adams, Federalist, was President, Thomas Jefferson, Democrat (or Democratic Republican if your prefer) was elected VP. As such, TJ presided over the Senate. It was pretty chaotic.
At the time it was also decided that having President & VP from the same state would also be a pretty bad idea.
The 12th Amendment was proposed & ratified soon thereafter.
Or at least the Electors from Florida couldn’t vote for both Trump & Desantis.
Maybe the two together would have such amazing charismatic power that the loss of Florida’s electoral votes would not matter. Like in 2000 with Bush/Cheney vs Gore/Lieberman.
Arne,
“hogwash”? really? you, Arne?
A riding heel is a pretty important part of a Buckaroo’s day-to-day: to be able to stand up and lock your foot into the stirrup while swinging a rope, hollaring hey or just generally a part of the ride. [that’s always been my excuse ;)]
I can’t picture meatball on a horse …
Fancy cowboy boots . . . You are right. And right again on getting the smell of saddle and horse on his Levi 501s (if he knows what those are). He does have a “I am short complex.”
It says on the internet Ron Desantis is 5 feet 9 inches tall.
The same height as Mike Dukakis.
13 Presidents were 5’9″ or shorter. The last one was Harry Truman.
He’s Nixon in high heels…
[ I find this offensive, no matter the political leader referred to. No need for me to read such an article. ]
ltr
You should take that up with Digby. It is mild comapred to all the things he has proclaimed about others.
The 12th amendment superseded article, but did not change the part about electors can’t vote for two home state candidates. The constitution thereby provides a check against them both being from the same state without actually preventing it. (Perhaps you are right that that is what same framers were trying to accomplish, but that is not what it requires.) It also did not require that the president and VP be from the same party, but by creating a separate vote for VP instead of the VP being second most votes, it did eliminate that unintended consequence.
I suspect that the aspect you mention would prevent any modern president from selecting a running mate from the same state even if trying to pull in voters from another state were not a high consideration.
Admittedly, the wording of the 12th Amendment is murky.
However, the intent is clear.
Amendment 12 revises and outlines the procedure of how Presidents and Vice Presidents are elected, specifically so that they are elected together.
… The Twelfth Amendment was not only a restructuring of presidential elections, but it was also a revision of American politics in the early 19th century. At its inception in 1789, the Constitution had established the Electoral College as the means for electing presidents. The approach to electing a president was that the electors were expected to select two candidates for office. There was no differentiation between the candidate who would become President and Vice President, and one of the two had to be someone who was not from the home state of the elector. This system would have the candidate with the majority of electoral votes become the President, while the candidate with the second-highest number would become Vice President. The specific purpose of having one majority winner with a runner-up was rooted in the concept of the “best man,” that being the concept by the Founders where the person most qualified to become President would be identified as such, while the runner-up would accordingly be considered the second-most qualified candidate, whereupon they would become the Vice President. This was influenced in-part by the generational perspective that political parties and alliances were antithetical to the long-term prosperity of republics, and many of the Founders accordingly advocated to prevent that outcome. By the beginning of the 19th century however, it was apparent that the emergence of political parties in America was not a possibility, but an inevitability.
In American history, the Presidential Election of 1800 was hugely significant. With Thomas Jefferson as the third President of the United States, it marked the first time in an election where an incumbent leader was defeated by a challenger. In addition to the victory of a challenger against the incumbent, the election of 1800 led to a tie majority vote. It was only after a contingent election in the House of Representatives that Thomas Jefferson was officially elected president, albeit after thirty-five gridlocked ballots. A major influence on these two subsequent tie votes was the state and federal government being divided into two major political parties: The Federalist Party, represented by John Adams in the election; and the Democratic-Republican Party, represented by Thomas Jefferson in the election. The Electoral College was not created to handle the complexity of political parties influencing the selection of presidential candidates. In 1803, a proposed amendment that would restructure the presidential elections was presented before Congress. It was subsequently ratified by fourteen of the then-seventeen states in the union, whereupon the Twelfth Amendment was enacted for all presidential elections from 1804 onward.
The Twelfth Amendment made a series of adjustments to the Electoral College system. For the electors, it was now mandated that a distinct vote had to be taken for the president and the vice president. Further, one of the selected candidates must be someone who is not from the same state as the elector. If no presidential candidate has a majority vote, or if there is a tie, the House of Representatives chooses who will be the president. The Senate goes through the same procedure for choosing the vice president if there is a tie or if no candidate gets a majority. …
Wikipedia: The Twelfth Amendment stipulates that each elector (in the electoral college) must cast distinct votes for president and vice president, instead of two votes for president (*). Additionally, electors may not vote for presidential and vice-presidential candidates who both reside in the elector’s state—at least one of them must be an inhabitant of another state. …
What this means: electoral votes must be cast according to election results in each state. In those state votes, voters do not choose president & VP separately. This means that in the electoral college, the counted results will be identical for both positions. That is, the electoral vote for the president will be the same as the vote for the VP. So long as there is a majority, both President & VP will be from the same party. Additional rules apply if there is no majority, further complicating matters.
* Previous to the 12th Amendment, the person with the most votes was elected president, and the runner-up was elected VP.
In other words, in every US state, voters to do not pick one candidate to be President and another to be VP separately. They choose a pair.
The actually party affililation of each member of pairs on a ballot, if they even have a party affiliation, is irrelevant, it seems.
OTOH, voters might well have a hard time choosing a pair consisting of two members with opposing political views. Stranger things have happened perhaps, now & then.
Your description of how it is working is not wrong, but it is not the Constitution that mandates it.
How mysterious.
What other document besides the Constitution & its Amendments mandates federal elections then?
Do tell.
I think maybe you are alluding to the 9th & 10th Amendments which ambiguously (IMO) indicate that states can get away with ‘doing their own thing’ if/when they feel like it. In this case, on election laws as to presidential voting. Sometimes known as ‘nullification’.
In this situation, the GOP would rely on their Supreme Court majority to provide favorable rulings.
First, I do not see anyone but Trump getting his base to slither out and vote for anyone but him— they will not vote for Biden but they will simply not vote if their guy is not on the ballot. Second the thought that Desantis or almost any Republican has policies is an oxymoron. Desantis’ policies are to double down on owning the libs. That works in Florida but it is preaching to the choir in the states Biden won in 2020 and I do not expect as much slithering without Trump. I recognize that without Trump some of the left will not turn out too. At the end of the day I have the optimism to believe a majority of Americans want the country and their children to succeed and with rare exceptions no Republican candidate and certainly not Desantis want that. I hope that a lot of people learned their lesson in 2016. I think the GOP position on the debt ceiling will have an outside effect on 2024 and I have no confidence in their ability to come out of this smelling like a rose.
P:aul Krugman reminds us that although interest on the Nat’l Debt is a big number, it is not a particularly large percentage of GNP. It was a higher percentage in previous recent decades. It would further seem likely that if Trump is on the ballot in 2024, the Dems will likely win again. If Desantis runs for the GOP, and Trump runs as an independent, the Dems will even more likely win again. IMO.
Essentially, this is because while the GOP can win Congressional seats in all those red states, they have a harder time winning Senate seats in at least some of them, and also a somewhat harder time winning their presidential votes, owing to Dem voters in urban (& suburban) areas. IMO.
Presumably, the GOP fallback strategy will be to press for no majority in the Electoral College, so that the GOP-controlled House (alas) can choose the President, and most likely it would not be the Dem candidate. With any luck however, the Dem-controlled Senate (hopefully) will get to pick the VP. Still, this would be awful.
If only Arizona & Georgia revert to form and vote for the GOP nom next year, then Biden wins by a smaller margin than last time. If Wisconsin (10 ev’s) votes GOP next year, along with GA & AZ, it’s going to be a tie and the House of Reps will decide in favor of Trump.