In situations like this, I extend blame first to the editors above. Somebody thought this was worth some of the country's toniest journalistic real estate. Other somebodies agreed. So a reporter was sent out to pursue this upper echelon wet dream. Now, the reporter could have ducked the assignment, but she is fashion director and chief fashion critic of The New York Times, so this is what she does for a living. She also could have come back and said that all her experience on the beat led her to conclude that there's no damn story here and, hey, it's almost Fashion Week in London. But, again, that would imply that a person with considerable expertise in the field was questioning the judgment of the editor who had this brilliant idea, and, my dear people, that simply... is...not...done.
So the reporter goes into the field and brings back the story and finds that the story has led her inevitably into producing the worst sentence in the history of political journalism. At which point, dear reader, our only hope is the NYT copy desk which, alas, does not notice that the worst sentence in the history of political journalism is lying right there in the copy like a flounder left on the dock. And that's how we all were treated to this:
Which means that so, too, is what Mr. DeSantis himself called in his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” the “Ron and Casey traveling road show,” a Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago by way of Disney series that is now going national.
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. I mean, I'm clear on the Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago bit, about which more anon. But attaching the DeSantis name to any connection with Disney makes me wonder if the reporter has been attending Fashion Week on Neptune for the past two years. I fully expect to see an ugly, angry walrus named Ronnie as the villain in a Disney full-length animation hit movie before the decade is out.
But it's the "Camelot-meets-Mar-A-Lago" business that sends this sentence sailing to the top of the worst. I guess we're all going to have to get used to Casey DeSantis, the wife of the candidate and, if some cynical Florida observers are correct, the brains of the operation, much in the way Angela Lansbury steered James Gregory in The Manchurian Candidate. The Daily Beast's Katie Baker has a nifty report on Team DeSantis and its first trip to Iowa in which Casey plays a very large role. Apparently, she decided now would be a good time to produce a bold fashion statement.
The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99. To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.
Baker goes on to somehow divine a more serious political and philosophical meaning in Melania's coat than can be found in Casey's, which I find a little bit weird, but OK, if we're judging candidate's wives by their taste in jackets, I guess we can plumb the depths of that, shoetop-shallow as they may be. But Camelot and Mar-a-Lago? Jacqueline Kennedy and Casey DeSantis? Have we all gone completely bananas? Now, I've read enough, and talked to enough people, to know that the Camelot myth was in many ways a front, but Jacqueline Kennedy's sense of style and grace was not.
She was a beautiful, educated woman of surpassing taste and elegance. Not only would she never wear something as tacky as DeSantis' jacket, she would be equally revolted by the crudity of its message. This was a woman who not only was widely read, but also who, after her White House days had ended so brutally, edited books by Bill Moyers, and by Joseph Campbell, Dorothy West's last novel, and the first one in Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mafhouz, the Egyptian author who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. Ron DeSantis, with the help of his wife, is running the most singularly anti-intellectual presidential campaign since the Know Nothings. To compare the Kennedy White House with the Trump White House is bad enough, but to imply that the DeSantis campaign is somehow a blend of the two is theater-criticism journalism gone utterly, barking mad.
In related news, Maureen Dowd wrote a nice column about Jackie Kennedy's days as the "Inquiring Camera Girl" for the Washington Times-Herald. (I was charmed by the vision of the future first lady waiting outside the Washington Senators clubhouse to work the players into her column — and by the fact that she permanently appropriated her roguish old man's convertible.) Things were going on elegiacally until the inevitable appearance of Dowd's beloved Irish cop pappy. Author, author!
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
"politic" - Google News
June 05, 2023 at 10:57PM
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How Not to Write About Casey DeSantis, Or Any Political Spouse - Esquire
"politic" - Google News
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