"The world is so still now, invaded by hands flailing."
It's easy to talk about two Americas when it comes to bipartisan politics, but I'm increasingly seeing it as the online-obsessed and normal world.
This week’s soundtrack: Chat Pile - “Anywhere”
Last week, Ron DeSantis launched his 2024 presidential campaign. DeSantis has been a darling of the conservative movement for a while, with a 20-point win over former Florida governor Charlie Crist last year. A lot of people in Florida – one of the nation’s most populous states – seemingly love or loved DeSantis, including formerly former President Donald Trump (who has since turned on his rival, calling him “Rob” over and over, which you gotta admit is funny).
DeSantis is also a frequent target of online progressives. Part of that is the long-running Florida-as-punchline motif, but most of it is DeSantis’ very conservative politics. But at the risk of being self-involved, I see a lot of myself in DeSantis when it comes to his online-ness and his obsession with the online world. The problem, of course, is that such a way of life is not the only way of life in the real world and, for his own sake, I think DeSantis would be smart to take a long look outside of his online bubble and the lessons of Trump ‘16.
I’m offering some free campaign advice to the governor (if he wants to take me on as a consultant, I’m available). Despite what has been said over and over, Trump didn’t win in 2016 because of memes alone. He ran a pretty good campaign (I cannot say that without noting that said campaign was built largely on white rage and a backlash against the first Black president), he ran against a very unpopular candidate and, mostly importantly, he has a personal magnetism that few others have.
(An aside: Said magnetism is not good. In fact, I always go back to the definitive 2017 David Roth piece on the man. In it, Roth outlines how Trump came to his “both sides” post-Charlottesville speech and defined what the former president’s appeal truly is: "To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States.”
I think about that sentence a lot when I see Trump or when I see his hangers-on and friends; it’s a smörgåsbord of Vince McMahon and Dana White and various other weirdos and broken toys. But, mostly, it’s selfish, crude, mean people who are in it for cruelty. That’s the brand to which the most diehard Trump fans aspire; so many voters just wanted some of the runoff of that “success.”)
DeSantis is many things – a pretty good slap-hitting outfielder, a political pugilist with bad instincts, a Navy veteran, etc. – but Trump he is not. Where he resembles Trump is his courting of online weirdos, including the number one online weirdo, Elon Musk.
As such, DeSantis launched his campaign last week on Twitter Spaces, a medium that is hardly without flaws and a medium that relies on Twitter-as-public-square to get people to pay attention; I imagine DeSantis would’ve gotten more participants and a better experience had he gone on Instagram Live, but Musk isn’t the person singlehandedly ruining Instagram. Twitter, as you’ve perhaps read in this space, is dying a slapstick but slow death, which includes a host of technical problems. DeSantis’ Twitter Spaces event was similarly plagued by technical problems and the online world jumped on the opportunity to make fun of the launch.
The questions come up fairly easily: Why did he tie himself to Musk’s flailing social media empire? Will this doom him for ‘24? During a month in which others joined the race, is it becoming too crowded? And mostly, if he can’t even do a proper campaign launch, how is he assembling a team to actually do a national campaign?
Ultimately, those questions may not matter, but the news industry is asking all of them. As I’ve written before, journalists are obsessed with Twitter (me included), despite it not having the penetration that other social media networks do. Hell, Marianne Williamson’s TikTok presence probably hits as many people as DeSantis’ Twitter thing did. But, journalists in the job of gatekeeping news love Twitter, so we’re all kind of stuck paying attention to it, if only tangentially.
With respect to the Washington Post, it’s foolish to compare it to Howard Deans’s scream or Michael Dukakis’ dorky tank photo, both because it’s too early and because it basically happened in a vacuum. Journalists cared, online weirdos cared, Musk pals probably cared, but way more people didn’t even know it was happening. Most people are not online-obsessed and most people have a normal relationship to the online world, so they avoid Twitter.
(It’s very silly to go all-or-nothing on “online” because online is everything now. We all get our news from online sources and the interplay between different media streams – cable news, print, social media, etc. – is so strong that the distinction is fairly minor. That said, the online-obsessed people make up a small percentage of the populace; I cannot imagine my mom, for example, know that Musk has been Nazi-adjacent for a while. She just knows he bought Twitter and that his cars blow up.)
It’s easy to forget that a lot of people – most notably, voters in early primary states who will shape the coming narrative – simply didn’t know. Adam Wren has an excellent on-the-ground piece from Iowa about this exact topic on Politico’s site in which he spoke to voters at a Tim Scott event in Sioux City about the (exceptionally early) state of the race and many did not know it happened.
Not Clinton Vos, a 63-year-old agricultural sales professional who wore a cowboy hat and milled around before the town hall began — just as official Washington was still gawking at the Twitter app crashing several times amid DeSantis’ highly anticipated campaign launch.
“I knew that it was going to happen today on Twitter,” he acknowledged, “but I’m not a Twitter follower.”
Wren noted that other candidates like former VP Mike Pence went on talk radio and had no glitches (low-hanging fruit, sure, but I respect it) and even observed that DeSantis’ interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox was smoother, albeit somewhat awkward because DeSantis himself is awkward.
If the governor is reading this, here is more free campaign advice: You need to become warmer, you need to stop focusing so much on the wokeness stuff and you need to shed yourself of Musk. You might actually resonate with some non-Sunshine State voters and, thus, have a better shot at beating the king of Florida Men.
GovExec Daily
Those who follow me on Twitter probably saw that GovExec Daily is no more. My producer Adam Butler and I (along with a few others) were let go from GovExec last week, thus ending our show’s run. This is the first time I’ve been laid off in a 20-year career and, having worked at one single place for 16-plus years (about 30% of the time GovExec has existed as an organization), it’s been jarring. I’m not sure how much I can say about the whole situation, so I’ll err on the side of safety to say that I absolutely adore my former colleagues (Adam, first and foremost) and I am deeply proud of the work I did there. I helped launched multiple sites (DefenseOne.com, RouteFifty.com and Nextgov.com), I built the company’s audio and social media infrastructure, I edited/sent thousands of newsletters and, of course, I did 781 episodes of the GovExec Daily podcast.
The show was only three and a half years of my time there, but it was the most visible, the most audience-intensive and the most fun. I am so proud of the audience we cultivated, the guest list we had and the work we did. I’ve heard from a bunch of listeners who shared their frustrations since GovExec announced the end of the show and it’s truly heartwarming to know that the work resonated with the audience. It’s a bummer that it ended the way it did (abruptly), but that doesn’t erase my pride in the work.
Lulu Update
I adopted Lulu a few months before lockdowns, so we’ve been five feet away from one another for the vast majority of the time we’ve been in one another’s lives. As always, she has been invaluable to my mental health in her silliness over the past few days. Dogs are truly miracles.
A Recommendation: Disconnecting (Kinda) From the Online World
I’ve spent a lot of time since Wednesday playing MLB The Show ‘23, reading and generally getting away from reading online news or being on social media. In the case of the video game, it’s not on my computer but rather on my Nintendo Switch (that forces me to get away from social media, news and that sort of thing). As you can imagine, a lot of friends and loved ones have offered to hang out (“if you need anything, let me know” is something I’ve heard a lot since Wednesday) and I have been taking some of them up on that.
It’s as good as you’ve heard. I spent most of Saturday night at a bar watching a basketball game with my Heat fan friend and it was about a million times better than basking in whatever the online world can give me. It’s a pretty chalk take, but get away sometimes and spend some time with people. It really helps if you’re going through some shit.
