Incoming criticism comes with the territory in politics, and responding to it is a skill. There are four, maybe five, schools of thought on how best to do so. Over the Christmas holidays, Ron DeSantis gave a clinic in one of them.
How to Respond
The first method of responding to criticism is simply to ignore attacks and hope they go away. Given the volume of criticism that faces any public official, everyone has to use this sometimes. In general, however, this tactic is only an option for dealing with real vulnerabilities if you can depend upon a sympathetic media to smother stories rather than escalate them when you are obviously hiding from them. No Republican on the national stage or in competitive jurisdictions can hope for that kind of media blackout.
The second option is to address criticism head-on, rebutting it and showing why it is wrong. One of the reasons why DeSantis has attracted a following outside his home state is that he has proven quite good at this on occasion, as has his communications team. For example, DeSantis won his battle with 60 Minutes last spring over using Publix to distribute vaccines when he rebutted his questioner so well and in such detail that she had to edit out most of his response — following which DeSantis and his team pounced by releasing the full video.
The third option is to counterattack: When the media or your political opponents attack, change the subject by hitting them back. George H. W. Bush going after Dan Rather or Newt Gingrich dressing down debate moderators for asking bad questions are famous examples of this tactic. Donald Trump, who hated to leave attacks unanswered but often faced criticisms for which he had no good answers, was especially fond of this approach. So were the Clintons in their heyday. A lot of Twitter spats between members of Congress go this way on both sides. DeSantis, for his part, also visibly enjoys playing the “there you go again, corporate media” card. Of course, voters eventually catch on if you lean too hard on counterattacks and never actually answer any questions. Overuse of this tactic also leads to misfiring. Leaders who are so thin-skinned that they need to personally counterpunch at everybody, rather than let their team or their surrogates carry some of the load, will end up alienating normal voters.
The fourth option is rope-a-dope: Let your critics think they are being unanswered and ignored, so that they become increasingly shrill and eventually make mistakes or turn people off in their desperation to get a response. From initial appearances, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish rope-a-dope from entirely ignoring attacks. Candidates who are way ahead in an election, such as Bill Clinton against Bob Dole in 1996, tend to use this tactic. George W. Bush loved it, and used it to great effect against Al Gore, but had so overused the tactic by his second term that his team’s capacity to do anything else had atrophied. Barack Obama’s version of this was termed “stray voltage” by his team: do something that is deliberately designed to attract criticism in order to make your critics look overwrought. Make them seem conspiratorial when they claim that the thing you did on purpose was done on purpose.
Like a great trap laid by a lawyer on cross-examination, a great rope-a-dope is hard to pull off. But, as Don Draper might say, it’s delicate, but potent. When perfectly executed, it not only exposes the adversary but leaves them open to a devastating blow when a response finally comes.
Those are the four traditional options. A fifth was unique to Trump: When you’re in a hole, either keep digging or start a new hole. Demonstrate that you will never back down, ever, no matter how red-handed your critics have you. Create such a huge, swirling vortex of simultaneous crises and criticisms that nobody can keep track of them all, and your critics start sounding like wild-eyed fanatics just trying to keep up and be heard over the din of each other. We can debate how well this worked out for Trump in the short and long terms: It’s an approach that helped him win the primary and general elections in 2016 and beat two impeachments, but it is also part of how he lost in 2020 and how he got impeached twice in the first place. In any event, this approach to criticism was so unique to Trump’s own personality that it would be madness to counsel anyone else to imitate it.
Where Is Ron?
That brings us to late December’s controversy: The usually omnipresent DeSantis went some two weeks without appearing in the media or at public events. Florida Democrats and national progressives thought that this opened him to a great attack: The governor has gone missing during a crisis! Never mind that the “crisis” was a pandemic that has been ongoing for two years now, and DeSantis — like any other governor who’s been in office the whole time — more or less knows what his menu of options are, and his team knows what he’d do.
Moreover, DeSantis, unlike Pete Buttigieg last summer, wasn’t actually off the job. He was still holding regular meetings in Tallahassee. This was well known because Florida has an extensive legal and political culture of openness under its Sunshine laws. One can easily examine who DeSantis is meeting with. What’s more, his press office sends out a daily schedule to the Florida press.
An aside on claims that DeSantis was absent from his job: This is, ultimately, a process story. Process stories, though much beloved by the political media, tend to break through to the greater public and do real damage only if the voters actually think the politician is doing a bad job, or if they think the politician is hiding because they are actually unwell. Then again, ever since Mark Sanford’s absence from office turned into a sexual-affair story that ended his career in statewide office, people in politics have taken the view that a missing politician might be hiding something bigger.
But it was foolhardy to go after DeSantis on this for related reasons: It was the Christmas holidays. DeSantis has young children. He’s likely got a busy reelection schedule in 2022, perhaps followed by a presidential campaign. And his wife is battling breast cancer. Nobody would really begrudge the man spending a little more holiday time this year with his family.
Still, Florida Democrats are nothing if not fools. And the DeSantis haters nationally only loathe and fear him all the more for the sheer number of timesthey thought they had him only to see him, like the Road Runner, sprint away undamaged while his pursuers wiped the shrapnel off their own faces.
So, Nikki Fried (vying with Charlie Crist to be DeSantis’s hapless opponent this November) pushed hard on the “where is Ron?” theme. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when caught vacationing in Florida, played that card as well: “Hasn’t Gov. DeSantis been inexplicably missing for like two weeks? If he’s around, I would be happy to say hello.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that DeSantis was “not governing during a crisis; and sunning his belly on vacation instead.”
There Is Ron
After letting this go on for two weeks, DeSantis answered his critics: He had been busy instead accompanying his wife to her cancer treatments. As he explained:
“I just looked at my wife. I’m like, ‘going to the hospital with you is not a vacation for you, I know that,’” DeSantis said. “This is something that as a husband, I think I should be doing. I’ve accompanied her to all her chemotherapy treatments. She’s there for a long time. I’m there most of the time.” “But it’s a draining thing,” the Governor added. “When she’s done with it, it’s not something that’s great to see.”
DeSantis said that for many people, including those who had gone through breast cancer treatments, “the notion that would be considered a vacation is offensive to a lot of those folks, and they understand what you’re doing.”
This was a textbook example of a perfect rope-a-dope. DeSantis could have shut down his critics earlier; instead, he let them wallow in their “trend this on Twitter” antics and increasingly overwrought rhetoric before finally wading in to present a reason for being out of the public eye that is beyond public criticism.
DeSantis then turned the knife on Ocasio-Cortez and other critics of his relatively unrestrictive COVID policies who nonetheless enjoy decamping to Florida for vacations:
“If I had a dollar for every lock-down politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I’d be a pretty doggone wealthy man, let me tell you,” DeSantis said Monday. “I mean Congresspeople, mayors, governors, you name it.”
“It’s interesting, though, the reception that some of these folks will get in Florida because I think a lot of Floridians say, ‘Wait a minute. You’re bashing us because we’re not doing your draconian policies and yet we’re the first place you want to flee to, to basically to be able to enjoy life,’” the Republican governor added. “So I’m not surprised to see that continuing to happen.”
They’re not the only ones; there has been a major exodus of Americans to Florida, while the more restrictive blue states have been bleeding people. It’s much more expensive now to rent a U-Haul from New York to Florida than from Florida to New York. If you look at net domestic migration between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, as computed by the Census Bureau, the top three states gaining people were Florida (+220,890), Texas (+170,307), and Arizona (+93,026), while the top three losers were California (-367,299), New York (-352,185), and Illinois (-122,460). The impact on Florida’s politics is likely to only strengthen DeSantis, as Florida’s voter registration has become markedly more Republican:
Karol Markowicz of the New York Post, who is one of the most New York people I know, finally had it and moved to Florida in December, driven largely by exasperation with New York City schools and their COVID mania. As she noted in her column explaining why she left for Florida:
When I announced our family was leaving New York and moving to Florida, a state with a governor who has led the way on sanely managing COVID-19, I received dozens of messages from New Yorkers considering the same move. When I asked several if I could quote them, they asked to use a fake name. . . . It’s telling that we don’t see high-profile people on the left announcing their departures from red states without vaccine or mask mandates. If lives are actually on the line, we should see an exodus of people from states like Florida or Texas. Instead we are seeing influxes of people from states with tight restrictions to states with looser ones.
Any New Yorker can tell you stories of random conversations with cab drivers, bartenders, parents in their kids’ schools, all sorts of people who are picking up and moving to Florida, or trying to make it happen.
If you’re wondering why people have only grown more interested in sizing up DeSantis as presidential timber over the past two years, the combination of his political skill in dealing with critics and the exodus of people voting with their feet to go live in his state should help explain it.