Opinion | Ron DeSantis Shows Some Good Manners

As Hurricane Ian loped through southwest Florida, emptying an ocean of rain on the region, lifting buildings off their foundations with its wind speed, and swamping lowlands with gray and frothy surges, it also fueled a subsidiary effect in Tallahassee, 400 miles from landfall, where the Republican Party’s excitable boy, Gov. Ron DeSantis, suddenly started acting like a normal politician.

The New York Times was among the many who observed DeSantis’ speedy transition from a red-toothed biter into a fuzzy lapdog with its Thursday piece, “As Storm Hits, DeSantis Pauses Political Bomb-Throwing.” Ordinarily a political opportunist — the sort of guy who flies asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard to score points, beats up on Disney for using its First Amendment rights, retaliates against the Special Olympics and lowers the boom on drag show bars — DeSantis has responded to Ian with the sort of governance you’d expect from Mitt Romney or any other governor who doesn’t consume a pail of bile for breakfast. The governor is actually governing in the face of Ian, steering relief dollars, monitoring the rebuilding of infrastructure and bucking up the downtrodden.

The most obvious shift comes in his dealings with President Joe Biden, whom DeSantis previously savaged as a “fella who just hates Florida.” Now he’s telephone buddies with Biden, thanking the administration for its disaster assistance. “The administration wants to help,” he said on Fox News Channel. “They realize this is a really significant storm.”

Why then has he chosen this moment to show his softer side?

One way of looking at DeSantis’ current retreat from acting like a loon is that it indicates that most of his previous stunts were for show — to appall Democrats, remake him as a national figure and rile the GOP base. And that his true heart beats like that of a normal politician. This is what you would expect from a person who had been socialized into the ranks of the ruling class with degrees from Yale and Harvard and a hitch in the U.S. Navy.

The better way to view it, of course, is that DeSantis’ new courtly manners are only the latest example of his opportunism. Disasters like Hurricane Ian move officeholders onto the national stage, where their every move is weighed and judged. Of course, a natural disaster isn’t a campaign event, and shouldn’t be treated directly as one. But voters regard them as a sort of proxy, a venue where a politician’s moxie in a crisis can be assessed. A smart president or governor knows he should impose calm with his example whenever floods and tornadoes make a physical shambles of the countryside, not excite passions or engage in fingerpointing. President George W. Bush never recovered from the damage done to his reputation when he applied something akin to benign neglect to Hurricane Katrina. Think of DeSantis’ performance not only as a hurdle to clear on his way to reelection but as a tryout for the White House, a position he so clearly lusts for; it’s a moment to demonstrate compassion if not competence. (And when it comes to Biden, DeSantis is truly in need of federal help. Feuding with the man who holds the key to Florida’s relief wouldn’t just look childish but could undermine his state’s recovery.)

In throttling back on the vitriol, DeSantis proves himself a wiser politician than Trump, the man who reset politics in 2016 to establish senseless fight-picking and name-calling as part of the normal political arsenal and allowing somebody like DeSantis to rise. Trump, unlike DeSantis, never figured out how to turn off the meshugana theatrics, even when it could have benefited him. Imagine if, for example, Trump had approached the Covid crisis with the reassuring cool of Barack Obama instead of roasting the issue in a bonfire every time he called a presser. He might still be president today.

Savvy politicians understand the value of making themselves the face of disaster recovery. Bush’s decision to join the NYPD at Ground Zero was genuine, but he also knew that projecting himself as the face of the city’s comeback would pay dividends. And it did. It would be craven to advise DeSantis to exploit the recovery for his political ends, but that’s what politicians everywhere do, so let’s be craven and instruct him to attach himself to Florida’s comeback.

The remaining question is whether Hurricane Ian truly tamed the tarnation out of Ron DeSantis or if he’ll revert to the guy he was. Evidence that he has made only a temporary adjustment to his political style and will return to culture warfare once Ian’s waters recede can be found in the words of his political aide Christina Pushaw. The political brawler on Wednesday tweeted, “Floridians’ lives are in danger, so of course CNN is rooting for the hurricane,” in response to an anodyne tweet by a CNN reporter.

Do we have to ask?

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Disclosure: I’m friends with the CNN reporter who authored that anodyne tweet. Send anodyne messages to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed remains calm. My RSS feed thinks disasters are the best time to pick fights.