Can Gov. DeSantis’ campaign for president manage to rise from the dead? | Opinion

After some newspapers mistakenly printed his obituary, Samuel L. Clemens — aka Mark Twain — famously quipped that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.

Despite that warning, I offer this obituary of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential election campaign. It died this summer of self-inflicted wounds.

His campaign strategy was to run to the right of former President Trump.

He proclaims himself champion of freedom and sworn enemy of censorship — “cancel culture” — but he retaliates against corporations whose leaders disagree with his policies. He uses the power of government to restrict what students are permitted to think about and discuss in classrooms, including universities that are supposed to be citadels of intellectual freedom.

He unleashes the ironically named Moms for Liberty to restrict how people exercise their freedom to check out reading materials from their local library. And he uses the coercive power of government to dictate women’s reproductive healthcare.

All of this got him to the right of Trump, but perhaps so far to the right that he will not be able to tack back anywhere near the middle to appeal to a broader electorate. That is, if he ever gets to face the general public. It’s looking less and less likely. He’s burned through millions of campaign dollars, laid off a bunch of staffers and just replaced his campaign’s manager — as if the problem is the campaign manager and not the candidate.

With his stubborn defense of Florida’s new teaching standards for African-American history, DeSantis has saddled himself with an image that is outrageous, hypocritical and so silly that it will be difficult for anyone other than complete devotees to take him seriously.

DeSantis’ appointees on the state Board of Education require middle school students to be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Some scholars charge this is ahistorical and amounts to miseducation. Others have responded with justifiable offense. It’s also just stupid. The first African slaves landed on American soil in 1619. The American institution of human slavery came to a legal end with the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln’s on January 1, 1863. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude was ratified and added to the U.S. Constitution on Dec. 6, 1865.

This means that the enslavement of human beings was maintained on American soil for some 246 years. Hundreds of thousands of human beings were brought here in chains — and many others died from the unbelievably brutal conditions in the bowels of ships in the Middle Passage.

To require teachers to characterize our “peculiar institution” as having imparted skills for some slaves’ “personal benefit” is white-washing and propaganda, not education.

DeSantis displays an arrogance and stubbornness that makes it difficult for him to admit the need for a course correction. The name of the super PAC backing his presidential bid, Never Back Down, is a giveaway.

This was apparent even when a fellow conservative, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, tried to throw him a lifeline, suggested that some revision of the African-American history curriculum standards was needed — which the governor promptly rejected.

Instead of directing the Department of Education to tweak the curriculum standards and moving on, the issue is now like an anchor around his neck.

Of course, the DeSantis campaign may be able to rejoin the land of the living — especially if the Trump campaign is crippled by the former president’s mounting legal problems. Or, perhaps, we’ll see a DeSantis campaign reincarnated in some future election cycle.

Long-time readers of premature political obituaries will recall the 1962 California gubernatorial election in which incumbent Gov. Pat Brown defeated former Vice President Richard Nixon, who then announced that, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

That’s one political obituary that didn’t pan out.

Howard Simon, Ph. D., was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997 through 2018. He is now president of Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation, Inc.