Meatball Ron

We here at Eschaton The Blog have long made fun of the press for promoting Ron DeSantis. There are a lot of hilarious headlines on pieces and columns, but I decided to go re-read a couple to see if they are as funny as the headlines make them seem now.

A stellar entry is Frank Bruni's:

Reading the column, the peril mostly seems to be "being wrong about Ron's chances."  Bruni claims he doesn't like DeSantis, but exactly who is this column directed at?  It isn't written for Republican primary voters, convincing them Ron is bad, but instead it's about how Ron could beat Trump, so don't write him off!!!

The hilarious bit is Bruni's central point, which is that, contrary to the views of other nattering nabobs, Ron's incredible discipline in just taking Trump's insults and never criticizing him is Smart, Akshually. 

How'd that work out?

Bruni links to another piece by Nate Cohn, which informs us that Ron is incredibly popular and that this is absolutely unprecedented for someone like him at that stage. Yah, Nate, he had a couple of years of fawning press coverage setting him up.  It's a complete mystery how that happened.

In this narrow but important respect, Mr. DeSantis has a lot more in common with Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan than Mr. Walker or the other promising first-time candidates who did not live up to high hopes in recent years, like Kamala Harris, Rick Perry or the retired general Wesley Clark.

...

There’s no need to speculate about whether Mr. DeSantis is the “next” Reagan or Obama. Not even Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan were clearly Obama or Reagan at this stage. And Mr. Reagan and Mr. Obama differ from Mr. DeSantis in the very same way that he’s purportedly similar to Mr. Walker, as both Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan rose to prominence by commanding the national stage in famous speeches during their party’s campaigns in 1964 and 2004.

How did Ron rise to such prominence without any good reason at all? Unknowable.

The unwillingness of the press to admit that they are actors - powerful actors  - in these dramas is maddening.