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Spiritus DeSantis

Given that it's way to soon to start talking about 2024 (OFFICIALLY), now seems like a good time to get ahead of the game and nip some things before they take off. And Example A of that would be... Ron DeSantis.

David Frum, combining prescient and clueless, posted the "watch out for DeSantis" lookout piece in The Atlantic this week, and he's not wrong: DeSantis is surely positioning himself to be a serious contender for the next presidential run. What's missing from Frum's otherwise compelling examination is... any sense of why the DeSantis show may well not be ready for prime time.

It takes far braver souls than I to dive deeply into Florida's politics; the state's unique mix of stalwart seniors (it's the oldest state in the US), large Hispanic native and immigrant populations, snowbirds with a dream, and a huge helping of deep southern traditionalists makes for a wild mix to begin with, add in the laissez faire, gold coast approach to economic opportunities and almost anything goes. There's a "Florida Man" meme for a reason. But the state's tantalizing bundle of electoral votes and politics that sway in the damp ocean breeze make for a sense that, well, anything's possible.

Not everything is, though. DeSantis is third or fourth in a string of lackluster, what's in it for me Republican opportunists elected as Governor, a line that includes millionaire healthcare executive Rick Scott and Charlie "now I'm a Democrat" Crist, as well as Jeb "I married an immigrant" Bush. All have enjoyed unique, famous for the wrong reason reps as Chief Executive... and careers that don't end, necessarily, in spite of it. DeSantis more or less limped his way into the job, pulled up by either unexpected turnout (the nice version) or some sort of manipulation (the darker conspiracist view) when Trump won office. As a result - and given Trump's Palm Beach residency which solidified on his watch - DeSantis was, outside of maybe only Kristi Noem, the President's biggest Governor toady.

Democrats have been hurting in Florida, as those results show. Much hope was pinned on defeating DeSantis  since his campaigning was haphazard at best and his career leading up to his run decidedly muddled. But Desantis managed to eke out a razor thin win (30,000 of 8 million cast) over Andrew Gillum (who, subsequently, flamed out spectacularly himself), and he goes up again next year fairly secure to likely sail through. And that will be largely in spite of, not because of, a mixed record at best.

What sells DeSantis and what he surely will run on, is that Florida wasn't, at least by what we know, a pandemic disaster. Enormous crises favor the well connected and the vaguely authoritarian, and Desantis, though feckless, has both qualities in spades. He locked down nursing homes and senior care facilities early (and, it should be said, at least it appears, tightly). He tried to limit lockdowns, but benefitted from the fact that he didn't have to try that hard: tourism fell through the floor, and has not, so far, rebounded to anything like pre pandemic levels. And he left a lot of the hardest choices to more local authorities, meaning Mayors made most of the hardest choices about mask rules, beach closings and social distancing, day to day.

In terms of vaccinations, DeSantis also had 2 assets on his side - a large senior population that had to be first in line and the ear of Trump officials making the earliest allocation decisions. While news organizations - 60 Minutes most notably - tried to pin him down on favoritism to businesses that supported him, DeSantis used public/private partnerships to distribute vaccines because that's pretty much all the state has: weak central governance and resistance to government run programs means the state leans on outside providers often, for everything. Sure, some rich Floridians jumped the line and anyone with a connection in the state could easily schedule a shot... but he's not a vaccine skeptic and he's made a conscious decision that being the death governor would hurt his image, which is, at least, politically astute.

Still Florida is #3 in total cases, #4 in total deaths (per capita, it's outside the top 10 in both, but so is New York, which may say more about poor choices in less populated states). They are the state which led the huge summer spike, and saw the second huge spike in January after a holiday season where businesses were open and masks not well policed. Further, cases remain alarmingly high and rising, even with a reasonable 25% total vaccinated population. DeSantis has a Covid case to make... it's just not nearly as good as many would like to suggest, at least in terms of actual public health metrics. Economically, DeSantis may have a point. But that's hard to make atop a raft of current deaths.

No, what DeSantis is really selling to a frustrated and angry Trump crowd and a nervous GOP more generally is a kind of Trump Lite: he's much more disciplined, more politically savvy (which isn't saying much), but happy to lay on the code words and conspiracy rhetoric to prove his loyalty. Desperate Republicans are clearly terrified of alienating the Trumpists, even as they know that going full Trump won't win elections; the DeSantis theory would suggest that you can have some of the ugliness but tie it to a more traditional political narrative, an actual office holder with experience in Congress and running a state. And, honestly, they may be right. Or that person might be Kristi Noem.

Whatever the case, national democrats need to take the threat of DeSantis seriously, if not literally. The ill winds blowing around perpetual fratboy Matt Gaetz could just as easily rope in DeSantis (though as a Catholic with a TV trophy wife, a sex scandal seems unlikely), and that Publix money could, in itself, be the tip of plenty of campaign finance messiness... though "sleazy money" and "Florida" are usually hard to make into career killers. No, the simpler case is that, for all his message discipline thus far, DeSantis could easily find himself in a national race out of his depth and prone to missteps. Lots of people think they can manage the Trumpist crowd to their own ends, but don't have Trump's sheer mendacity or desperation to go wherever that road leads. DeSantis may have no shame, but he's prone to mess ups in public speaking and a tetchy demeanor that plays well on Fox but hasn't been tested outside of the local market.

Even with all that, the threat is that all the stink in the world may not be enough to stall DeSantis if he can turn his modest skills into a juggernaut of big money, right wing media support and a MAGA crowd to back it up. That presumes, of course, that Trump himself can be kept out of it (a big if, at least for now) and the MAGA crowd can be managed; I have my doubts on that as well. But still. DeSantis, from a Florida catbird seat, would start with a number of advantages, ones that could be crushing if no one starts, now, assembling the evidence against him. And while I think we are still a country that tolerates Florida, rather than embracing it... I don't want to stress test that theory more than is absolutely necessary. I've been on enough cruise ships, and seen enough Spring Break movies to know... there could very easily be more of them than of us. And I wouldn't just leave the prospect of President DeSantis to chance. 

Friday Favorite: WandaVision

Damn you, Disney Plus.

I held out as long as I could, I tried... and tried. But the combination of a fairly (let's not overstate it) reasonable add on offer from Hulu combined with...well, this program, finally did me in.

Whatever objections I may have to centralizing Disney's monopolistic hold on content, there's no denying the potency of the MCU, aka Marvel Cinematic Universe. And no single film or show underscores the possibilities of their creative potency like WandaVision.

Set in the aftermath of Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, we are confronted in this series by the grief of Wanda Maximoff, she being on of the Sokovian twins originally introduced in Age of Ultron. Wanda's mix of telekinetic powers and telepathy seemed incredibly strong, but WandaVision takes those powers to another level entirely. In her grief at losing Vision (the AI Jarvis made flesh in Ultron), Wanda puts a hazy bubble around a small New Jersey town and turns it into a sitcom haven where she can hide from reality.

This is the real genius of WandaVision: taking the television situation comedy genre of the second half of the twentieth century and using it as a leitmotif for drama, grief and so much more. Initially, we see little more than the literal sitcom Wanda wants to create; but with each episode's devolving iteration, cracks and tears in the fantasy begin to emerge. For one thing, Wanda's powers aren't strong enough or developed enough to sustain her total control. For another, since she's making things up as she goes, she runs into the limits of her own imaginations. But mostly, since she's mostly running on the pure emotion of grief, she's really not making thought out or rational choices.

In the context of the sitcoms, all of this is genius; from crossing The Dick Van Dyke Show with Bewitched to turning the move to color tv into a psychodrama to deconstructing the genre via Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family... WandaVision crosses sitcom tropes with those momentary glimpses of real feeling, all with comic book twists. Meanwhile, outside Wanda's bubble, the real world is trying to figure out whether she's an uncontrolled danger or  someone to be reasoned with. And all that's before we discover that a character within the bubble is much more than she appears to be.

Real Marvel junkies are also, of course, to a series that redefines "Easter Egg" - symbols, clues and visual cues abound. Even watching the Easter Egg dissection videos on YouTube (they are numerous, but I recommend Nerdist), you don't fully grasp the brilliance on display. Eminently watchable and rewatchable, WandaVision yields up fresh insights on repeated viewings, as only great art really can.

Much of what's here hangs on the considerable talents of the cast, as the show taps the skills of Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda and Paul Bettany's Vision in ways that the Avengers series just left on the table. Aided by tv veterans like Debra Jo Rupp and Emma Caulfield and Kat Dennings they can hardly go wrong. But there's also Kathryn Hahn burnishing her scene stealing rep and Teyonah Parris and Randall Park to remind us that the gift of the MCU is an incredibly deep bench. There just isn't a performance misstep in the cast. But the real credit for seeing all of this is Jac Schaeffer, series creator and head writer, ably abetted by Matt Shakman, the show's lead director and himself a veteran of sitcoms as a child actor.

At it's best - in this sense, as a cohesive, end to end well told story - WandaVision shows both what the MCU can do when allowed to open out in a thought through long form series, and a way of thinking differently about what comic book sensibilities bring to other media... much the same way, actually, Watchmen recently did for HBO. Both, too, are reminders that thinking differently about casting is as much about thinking about telling better stories in different ways as it is looking for fresh approaches to representation.  From Regina King to Randall Park to Teyonah Paris and so many others in both shows - we will get better richer performances from every performer when they're challenged. Even just on the visceral level of delivering a wildly entertaining, captivating, leave em wanting more spectacle... WandaVision more than delivers. This is just a good compelling watch as much as anything. And it's remarkable how special and rare that actually is.

Real Time: Ain't No Mountain Low Enough

"Did you see that clip from Bill Maher" comes at you one of 2 ways, ways you can usually spot in the tone of the questioner. It's either the "can you believe this" tone of exasperated outrage or the "You've gotta see this" of a Maher loyalist often meant to imply to the questioned that your similar balloon of preconceptions needs bursting. This week, of course, it was "Have you seen Sharon Osbourne" though Maher managed to upstage both her and himself, with a separate bombastic rant about covid hysteria and praise for Ron DeSantis.

Yeah... I'm not here to get into most of that... but maybe I'll circle back to it.

No, what struck me is how I mostly consider Maher an irrelevancy. I've never bothered to review Maher's shows, or even discuss him generally when discussing tv comics; I don't really see the point. Maher's essentially been doing the same shtick for years (even arguably launched a slew of wannabes, like, say, Greg Gutfeld), with about the same effect on the national conversation all along. And me... I don't really see the point.  

But hey, I'll say it: Real Time with Bill Maher is an overhyped, undercooked mess of classy trash - insult humor for the quasi-sophisticate set who enjoy the self satisfied host's air of smug superiority and takedowns of easy marks. Granddad to all the "nothing matters and what if it did" comic takes on politics (oh wait, that's George Carlin), Bill Maher can probably ride this dead horse into retirement... but that's not going to change the pointlessness of it all.

Maher started his career bouncing around the middle of the stand up golden years, back in the eighties when the spots were plentiful and the white guys ruled. Not great, not terrible, Maher has a way with a sly wisecrack or arch putdown and what was, at the time, a "postmodern worldview towards current events" that only afterwards did many of us notice was upscale nihilism in a deadpan dress. In the early nineties, Maher parlayed that shtick into the nascent Comedy Central's late night offering "Politically Incorrect" which, largely by timing, arrived in the right place at the right moment. Skewering "political correctness" in a modest, nobody cares timeslot was a good perch for him and the growing power of cable combined with an appeal to college kids and recent grads lent him an air of Letterman like hipness.

In general, Maher isn't: arriving in the early moments of the Clinton era made him the perfect foil for West Wing era type Kennedyesque hopefulness; it helped that Maher's personal presentation was straight out of the Rat Pack/Playboy After Dark hipsters of a similar era. When Clinton's personal issues blew up into the impeachment saga, Maher rode his act over to parent ABC, and took over their late-late slot (after Nightline), again showing that being a modest success in a nothing timeslot is a kind of stardom. That gig fell through after 9/11 when Maher's screeds against Muslim terrorists crossed from sarcastic to, well, all too real.

And that's Maher's real problem, trying to find that knife edge of just outrageous enough, but not pushing it, insults to the hobby horses of one side or another. Self described as liberal, Maher is just another cynic who is pretty sure they're all liars and crooks, or not cool enough to get what's really going on. He bolstered that act by combining a mix of generally 2nd to 3rd rate celebrities with the kind of political bomb throwers (legendarily, Ann Coulter... but pretty much most of those nineties right wing "author/pundit/columnists" and the eventual lefties who chased after them), tossing a straw man amongst them, and seeing if it caught on fire. Oooh, the outrageousness! Cue the clutched pearls!

Since getting tossed by ABC, it was inevitable that Maher could still find a buyer for what he was selling, and so... there he is, muddling through on HBO as he has for 18 years and counting, still hawking it like an aging stripper who went up market and is now mostly rhinestones and feathers and a lot less skin. Maher skews the proceedings by giving himself both an opening and closing monologue, ten minutes or so with someone usually hawking a policy book or memoir (I'm guessing John Boehner, soon enough), and another 10-12 with 3 "guests": still a Coulter like object, a well meaning but usually clueless Hollywood type and a DC pol looking to ziz up their recognition numbers. No insight, I guarantee you, will be derived.

Trying to get through it is exhausting - I suspect Maher sustains himself, these days, on the fact that John Oliver, while funnier and more topically relevant, comes across as a bit dry and airless. Maher's always been the class clown of the frat party, frantically working the room, pushing any button til he hits, and that desperation does get the job done, eventually and usually. Maher's real Achilles heel is that his monologues, while clever, insist on making him the hero of the joke: he's the one armed with the brilliant insight, the "secret truth," the last thrilling reveal. It's hard being Pithy on Purpose - it is, actually, the opposite of pith. If Maher's occasional flashes of brilliance lead to an indeed meaningful insight, he drowns the good in a sea of "it's meaningful because I say it is." It's too easy, in the end, for Maher to simply play the eternally cynical contrarian, reminding you - the audience - that your real weakness is caring about something, someone, or worse, a principle like justice or ultimate good. Pour yourself a whiskey and listen up kids... the world is going to let you down. See how right I am? QED.

And so Maher tried to double bill his cynical counterprogramming, absolving Osbourne of the racist stench that got her booted from The Talk, while simultaneously piously intoning that only he could serve as arbiter of what is sensible covid health policy and what is overkill. On the latter, he's neither, though the antiscience, anyone can play expert motif is probably more in tune with the times (and why that story mauled Osbourne's, yet again). Osbourne plays to his personal, still Rat Pack-y demeanor as an aging hipster who is weary of the performative wokeness. She may play well to a part of his audience, but Maher's own bad reputation is starting to catch up to him... and Osbourne's presence just underscores how much of Maher's act is long past its freshness date.

Because, ultimately, the "cancel culture" myth is just the "politically correct" bugaboo in new words: a sort of "it's unfair to criticize me for saying this awful outrageous thing when you're just as awful, mostly for being critical." As Politically Incorrect demonstrated, Maher can beat that dead horse all he likes, and make a clever not exactly funny show of it... but ultimately, there's nothing there but dead ends. Real Time may let him take the old material and dress it up like Dick Cavett, but the shtick remains and the act is beyond old. It's not that Maher may get cut, yet again, on his knife edge of outrageousness... it's that the knife is pretty dull these days. Even if the faithful haven't yet caught on to that.

The Land Without A King, Talk Radio Without Rush

There didn't really seem to be a reason to memorialize Rush Limbaugh - don't speak ill of the dead and all that - but Eric Boehlert makes a point I share: there won't be any more Rush Limbaughs:

"Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media," the Washington Post reported this year.

The pandemic also hit talk radio hard. "2020 is the year that in-car AM/FM radio has hit the proverbial iceberg," Radio World reported. "The COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns severely curtailed regular commuting journeys, where much of consumers’ radio-listening originates."

The right-wing talk format also skews way too old. "We're at the sea-change moment," Radio America's Mike Paradiso recently told Axios. "At some point, the stations need to make a shift to bring in younger listeners." 

AM Radio was slowly dying when Rush moved into talk radio in the mid eighties, and while he stanched the bleeding for about 10 years, as Boehlert and his sources note, the demographics got away from even him. Where broadcast deregulation (from ending the Fairness Doctrine to dropping ownership limits to opening up cable and broadband) gave Rush an opening, those very changes also spelled his, and the genre's, demise: there are too many choices, and too little spark remains, to recreate the dominance of a singular voice as Rush had and did.

Moreover, that's how Rush wanted it. No one did more to clear the field and salt the ground than Rush himself: hyper competitive, hateful to the point of spitefulness, Rush didn't just trample challengers, he obliterated the possibility of even trying. He was vicious, on air, to anyone who dared come for him, and behind the scenes he bigfooted any attempt to challenge him, going so far as to jump stations in major markets if he felt it would increase his dominance (or, more importantly, his paycheck). Sean Hannity gave up trying; others, like Laura Ingraham, paid the price and left the business almost all together (until Ingraham limped her way into Fox's 10pm slot, she'd been a nonstarter in both TV and radio). Rush's show was a solo operation - especially when he decamped from WABC in New York and set up his own quasi network in Florida, whose sole purpose was to feed his daily 3 hours. He trained no successor. He encouraged no supporting talent. His network didn't even offer a complimentary show to extend his reach. No the Rush show was just that... The Rush show. And he took it with him as he left.

So who can replace him? Boehlert mentions new shows being shopped by Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino; I laugh at both. Loesch, at least, is a proven talk radio quantity - but that's the point: any known radio voice is already known to not be able to dominate 12-3 as Rush did. Bongino is largely a joke - he lacks (I know, I know, but stay with me) even a tenth of Rush's actual warmth and respect for the genre. Hannity? He's the star that remains, but his appeal was always weaker. Mark Levin? Fuggedaboutit.

There will, of course, be skeptics. People who think of Rush as all purpose demagogue, and the right is just ready to plug and play any replacement... say, Tucker Carlson. That, really, is to misunderstand what Rush dominated, how he did it, and why. Carlson does, yes, sit in the same catbird seat as Bill O'Reilly and enjoys, I'd argue a dominance on par or slightly higher than Bill's: an agenda setter, sure, but mostly the lead presence to harangue naysayers and enemies into submission. Rush was something else. At his height, he didn't just set the tone or start the conversation - he completely up ended the conservative agenda, and forced the right to heel the madding crowd. Rush's real skill, after all, was how finely attuned he was to his audience; he could carefully recalibrate almost any point, if callers proved it unpopular. He did no interviews, asked no experts, flew on nothing but his own opinions and the words of his listeners. No one, really, has shown themselves anywhere near able to do what he did at the scale he did it. 

And that, in part, is where we should perhaps honor his actual skill: Rush loved talk radio, lived it, breathed it. He mastered the genre like no one before... or indeed, since. He wasn't just good at it. He was masterful. And that, ultimately, is why we will never see anything quite like it again. Yes, the circumstances that fueled his rise are gone... but mostly, so is he. There was always a local radio version of Rush in nearly every major market: Howie Carr, after all, still reliably delivers it, day after numbing day. Rush was the one who took it national, who swung for the fences and played for The Show. And then he took his bat and knee capped anyone who dared come near him.

There will be blowhards. There will be demagogues. We will, for however much longer, be saddled with Tucker and Hannity and all the others (and here's to Greg Gutfeld, who proves that there will never be a Rush of late night comedy either). There will not, though, be a singular player in the field dominating it the way Rush did, for anything like the period when he did - it's worth observing, after all, that neither his ratings or his reach were anything like what they'd been, either during the Trump years or at his death. Indeed, Trump is the playing out of Rush's dominance for the farce it was - cynical blowhards have their place, but it's not as the head of national government. The world moved on, even Rush knew that. And there is no mantle to take up, no crown to make one's own. Talk radio without Rush is just the sad backwater it was doomed to become all along, and standing tall amongst the remaining midgets won't make you the right's newest star. There won't be another Rush. And isn't one enough?