Tuesday, August 15, 2023

ANNALS OF DeSANTISTAN: Ron DeSantis hogged a bumper cars ride, then his campaign made it a bigger issue. (Jesse Scheckner, Florida Politics)

Our ex-Congressman from St. Johns County is now our Florida Governor, RONALD DION DeSANTIS.  

Governor DeSANTIS, his wife and his staff lied about the bumper cars.  

This is an "unforced error."  

Character counts. 

We in the reality-based community renounce DeSANTIS, and all of his works and pomps.

I reckon the good people of Iowa will soon have had enough of this insolent impudent snob.

From Florida Politics:

Ron DeSantis hogged a bumper cars ride, then his campaign made it a bigger issue. 

Jesse Scheckner

Florida Politics

August 14, 2023


‘The ride was open to anyone who wanted to join,’ DeSantis’ campaign said despite video evidence to the contrary.

Ron DeSantis committed another unforced error in his quest for the White House, when his campaign over the weekend shut out the public or accepted exclusive use of a bumper cars ride at the Iowa State Fair.

It wasn’t a great look for someone trying to seem relatable in spite of a growing record of awkward interactions on the campaign trail.

Then his campaign exacerbated the misstep by lying about it.

DeSantis, his wife, Casey, and their three small children visited the Des Moines fair Saturday, joining several Republican pols from Iowa to drum up support for the Governor’s floundering run at the presidency.

He flipped burgers and pork chops alongside U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and U.S. Rep. Zach Nunn, rubbed elbows with fairgoers, won carnival game prizes and enjoyed a few rides. He also absorbed praise from supporters, heckles from protesters and taunts from the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, who attended the fair too and paid for a cheeky banner flown overhead that read, “Be likeable, Ron.”

Those interactions, as well as a nasty argument between officials of a PAC backing DeSantis and a Trump supporter at a nearby dive bar Thursday yielded early headlines. But the bumper cars faux pas might prove more enduring due to subsequent insistence by the DeSantis campaign that people disbelieve their eyes.

A video Team DeSantis posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, shows the Governor and his wife piloting a pair of bumper cars, each with one of their children as a passenger, and several empty vehicles parked around them.

Roughly a dozen onlookers can be seen standing outside the railing. Many have cameras and are recording the private bumper cars run. Others appear to be idling about while waiting a little longer for their turn.

Another video posted to Forbes’ YouTube page also shows the entire rink empty except for the DeSantises and a fair staffer.

The jeers arrived not long after the videos and others hit the web.

“Always a great idea on a Saturday … to shut down a popular attraction so voters can watch you have a good time,” wrote Ron Filipkowski, a Sarasota-based lawyer and former Judicial Nominating Commission appointee of DeSantis’ who has since become one of the Governor’s most frequent critics.

Others suggested DeSantis missed a fundraising opportunity.

“I, personally, would have paid $100 to ram into him,” wrote Greer McVay.

Rather than ignore the criticism or offer a reasonable explanation for why the ride had been closed — for instance, to maintain security for a presidential candidate in a setting that invites physical contact — DeSantis’ team chose a less forthcoming tack.

“This is completely false,” wrote Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ campaign Press Secretary. “The ride was open to anyone who wanted to join for that run.”

The videos tell another story and make it so one of two things is true: Either it is not “completely false” that the bumper cars were closed to others while DeSantis and his family used them, or none of the people waiting in line wanted to get on the ride when it was their turn because they collectively agreed the DeSantises should have it to themselves.

Which of those two rings truer?

Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer for the conservative National Review magazine, said he was “right there” at the bumper cars ride when the DeSantises used it alone. Roughly “10-15 people” were in line, he said, and there were “more people taking pictures of DeSantis … than people waiting for him to get off.”

“Basically, they just waited through one ride,” he wrote on X. “It’s not as if the Secret Service would have let Trump or (President Joe) Biden do it differently.”

True, but the point is that DeSantis’ campaign needlessly lied about something so easily refutable.

And it wasn’t the only time the Governor hogged a ride that day. A video Iowa Starting Line posted to X shows the DeSantis family and Ernst riding a Ferris wheel, which is also oddly empty of others.

Close to 118,300 people attended the Iowa State Fair on Saturday.

Arguably the cringiest clip of a Republican candidate at the fair goes to entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy for his rendition of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” Ramaswamy, a self-professed “anti-woke” candidate who has called Juneteenth a “useless” holiday, gave up on the number less than halfway through its first chorus.

Ramaswamy now leads DeSantis among likely GOP voters in a national survey by Kaplan Strategies. Both trail in distant second and third place, respectively, behind Trump.

Florida Politics contacted the Iowa State Fair for comment but received none by press time.

Jesse Scheckner

Jesse Scheckner has covered South Florida with a focus on Miami-Dade County since 2012. His work has been recognized by the Hearst Foundation, Society of Professional Journalists, Florida Society of News Editors, Florida MMA Awards and Miami New Times. Email him at Jesse@FloridaPolitics.com and follow him on Twitter @JesseScheckner.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is what happens when a Pontevedra wine bibber becomes governor. You get the usual non governance and the individual merely there to appease housing gamblers and right wing police state military.

5:57 AM

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