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Meatball is frying in a dumpster fire.
(hexbear.net)
archive.today • DeSantis struggles grow in GOP presidential race - The Washington Post
The original title was better.
'A dumpster fire': DeSantis struggles grow in GOP presidential race
Maybe he's not the Mayo Pete of the Republicans. I don't think Mayo Pete is this socially inept as a politician.
Yeah. Pete is the opposite of socially inept. His issue is that he comes across as an apex of the professional managerial class, a perfect tool, and not a President or Congress person. Manager of empire rather than leader of empire. Average person doesn't look at him and think "this is a leader" but this person is a right hand to leaders, a fixer, or an extremely competent career bureaucrat. Not a political policy maker but the one who advises and executes on policy. Henry Kissinger, Samantha Powers, or Janet Yellen rather than a Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, Clinton, Obama, Trump, or Biden.
Political leaders come and go but men and women like him if they don't decide to waste their time like he has on being a politician, outlast multiple generations of elected politicians and earn a page in the history books just the same. I'm surprised he went into politics because there is very real power in the so-called deep state and even though the general public at most vaguely knows of you, top political and business leaders know you by name. I guess his one issue is a narcissistic streak that doesn't match the rest of his personality, needs that public recognition a political leader gets rather than being happy with the power of an extremely competent top level career bureaucrat.
True. I agree with your well-fleshed out analysis. He would have an easier time being a bureaucrat in the national security apparatus. Yet he keeps trying to shoehorn himself into a more public facing role. Between him and DeSantis, they both still display a similar naked ambition to attain those roles, a symptom of which is their obsessive resume building behavior. I find that in particular to be an aspect of their personalities that I greatly loathe.
Having though of this after brief reflection , perhaps you would agree that the elder HW Bush was a more successful person at attempting to inhabit both the roles that you describe? Over the course of his career he saw success as both a bureaucrat in several capacities as well as a politician (though not completely successful as he was a one-term president).
Yeah. HW Bush is an outlier but he also came from a different social class than Pete or Ron, unlike them he was a scion of the Bush family. Class is something weird to talk about in the American context due to lacking the formal nobility with titles seen in the old world. Both of them are the equivalent of commoners while HW Bush was born an aristocrat. The Bush family even before HW Bush were both a political dynasty and wealthy, that goes a long way to getting what you want or being installed by others of your class as a steady hand if you are at least half competent.
Pete and Ron maybe are the type of nerds who really believed all the bullshit self-made from middle class family backstories both Clinton and Obama managed to sell the public. Which only worked for Obama because of the color of his skin and last name. Ironically the Obama birther conspiracy theory broke a lot of racists minds when they went really digging in Obama's family history and found he was related to a handful of recent presidents, sent them from pakistani illegal immigrant to Illuminati control everything type thinking. Anyway, family does matter and can open a lot of doors, even in the US where everyone is told there isn't a hereditary class system and all men are created equal.
I agree. HW may be a template for Pete and Ron to follow but, they possess considerably less wealth and networking power to propel them to a position atop any hierarchy within their lifetimes. As you said, we are talking about WASP nobility who have been here centuries vs the descendants of Southern European immigrants who have only been here a century or so. One family has had more time to establish and embed themselves atop the class structure than the other.