Holy macaroni, that was weird and a half. Yeah.
Now the first thing you’ll notice out there, once you’re out of the hospital after sticking two pairs of barbecue tongs in your ears rather than listening to another word of that, is that the video features a lot of musk stuff. There may be more Musk videos than DeSantis; if you stumbled across this video out of the blue, without further context, you would almost certainly think Musk was running for president and DeSantis his dull-eyed running mate.
Look, it’s Elon! Look, it’s Elon at Tesla! Here is Elon with a flamethrower! Here’s a big rocket, Elon made this! Oh, and here’s our candidate too, I guess, but look! Elon gets out of a truck!
There is a very good explanation for this, and the explanation is that Ron DeSantis has the charisma of a melted plastic spoon. You can’t find 30 seconds of him expressing any other emotion other than dull-eyed dismay. You can’t make an uplifting campaign video out of DeSantis clips scold school children. If you listened to the audio in this video, it’s clear that Ron DeSantis is about as inspiring as a carton of spoiled milk.
Have you heard of stolen bravery? Ron’s campaign staff attempted a bit of stolen charisma on this one. You have audio of DeSantis humming like he’s reading the world’s worst audiobook, coupled with video of Musk firing flamethrowers and expressing human emotions.
Our candidate also has charismayou can hear campaign staff arguing. Once upon a time in the same video feed as someone with charisma, and it’s practically the same thing!
DeSantis’s announcement speech was so boring that it would be illegal to subject lab rats to it; DeSantis had no hope of injecting show in a campaign kick-off event that would normally pack more punch than its “man reading Arby’s entire menu before placing his order” could muster. Scrambling, the DeSantis campaign sought a venue for the candidate where he wouldn’t actually have to speak.
And, if you stayed for even the smallest part of the Elon-Ron show, you saw that’s what quickly happened. After finally reading his announcement speech, DeSantis drifted into the woodwork of the video and the rest of the video consisted mostly of Musk and his fans talk to each other.
If Ron DeSantis wasn’t clearly a fascist-minded sociopath bent on propelling his own rise to power from frothy grievance politics targeting declared enemies of conservatism for isolation, retribution and destruction, it might almost get you. make him feel sorry for him. Or, you know, not.
Faced with having to develop a personality that does not immediately appeal to his audience strange valley on their smartphones, he searched the far-right movement for someone with a far-right charisma he could copy, and settled on…Musk? Well, it’s a choice.
As for the second part of our question, whether the resulting cluster poop could rank among the worst campaign deployments in history remains to be seen. Even though the DeSantis campaign didn’t bet the event’s success on the technological prowess of a company detained with stolen paperclips, and even though the results were not stories featuring “DeSantis” and “glitched” in the same titlesyou can see what the campaign looked like from this simple video ad they put together.
From the start, it seems the plan was to borrow some of that creepy charisma from Musk and stuff it into the campaign ad to cover up their inability to find a video of their actual candidate being charismatic.
A 2019 New York Magazine article provides a quick list of some of the other “worst deployments in history” disasters. Scott Walker was the last candidate to be so touted – that is, self-proclaimed – before quickly becoming a non-entity on the campaign trail. Rick Perry’s 2012 campaign cemented his national persona as boring, inquisitive and of questionable competence. The Jeb! The campaign got the “worst” crown at the time, not for any particular campaign deficiency, but for Jeb Bush’s painstaking inability to, yes, distinguish himself from a hole in the ground. But again:
https://twitter.com/still_oppressed/status/1661567549560193024?s=20
We can only say that DeSantis’ launch isn’t the worst in history because “launch” is usually rated as the first few months, rather than the first few days of a campaign. But he certainly started from the bottom of the bottom.
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