On Saturday night, Ron DeSantis took the Florida Blueprint to the Volunteer State, a place where a recent poll saw him at 12%.
Despite the sub-par numbers, DeSantis offered an aspirational vision, with much of the speech focused on finding a contrast between himself the current President, and painting himself as an heir to another one.
The Governor, in remarks to the Tennessee Republican Party, led off with jabs at President Joe Biden’s cognitive state.
“I’m excited because 2024 is our opportunity to send Biden to his basement in Delaware where he belongs. Now, we, my wife and I were in Iowa earlier today and so this is the second state on our agenda. Biden, I think has been in two states to today. Confusion and disorientation. But that’s just another day at the office here. Look, you got to kind of admire this is a guy that wakes up every morning and his people let him know that he’s the President of the United States. Imagine finding that out every morning,” DeSantis quipped.
DeSantis worked in a jab at Hunter Biden later in the speech in talking about schools and adult material.
“If as an adult if you want adult material, the proper place is not a fourth grade classroom. Okay, go view Hunter Biden’s laptop for all I care just keep it away from our kids,” the Governor joked.
The Governor also got in a line about President Biden’s granddaughter, whom Hunter fathered, in pillorying Biden’s assertion that America’s kids are “all of our kids.”
“First of all, Joe, they’re not your kids. Second of all, before you’re saying they’re all of our kids, why don’t you spend some time with your granddaughter in Arkansas, or at least recognize her existence before you start worrying about our kids.”
In addition to quips reminiscent of Ronald Reagan, the Governor hearkened back to the perception of fiscal discipline during the former President’s heyday in the 1980s.
“We need to have a president that can go into Washington and will actually hold the line on excessive spending and we haven’t had that probably since Ronald Reagan. If you look at the debt that’s been accumulated, yeah, we can sit here and hit Biden and he deserves a lot of it. But it wasn’t just the Democrats. Republicans and Democrats in DC are both responsible for putting us $32 trillion dollars in debt. It’s time to stop and go a different direction.”
Toward the end of the speech, the Governor again recalled Reagan and the election of 1980 in drawing a contrast with Biden.
“2024 I think gives us the best opportunity to put the country on a significantly better path for the first time since Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980. I think the American people look at Biden, they know he’s failed. They know the country is going in the wrong direction, and they want a fresh start. They want to go in a different direction.”
Policy was a focus, and the speech included some newer material than some others.
DeSantis, who has been critical of the U.S. Supreme Court in the recent past, offered praise to two religious freedom decisions late this term.
“You know you y’all hear about some of these Supreme Court cases,” DeSantis said. “A Coach Kennedy in Washington State wins at the Supreme Court. He lost his job as a football coach, because he wanted to hold a prayer at midfield after a high school football game. So he loses his job. He’s got to go all the way to Supreme Court and yes, he wins. And that’s, quote, ‘a victory.’ But our Founding Fathers would have never believed that saying a prayer would have caused you to have to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“We see this 303 Creative Case. They go all the way to the Supreme Court to say wait a minute, Colorado can’t force you to do messages that you disagree with and that conflict with your Christian faith. Yeah, a victory. But you had three justices that ruled against them,” DeSantis lamented, despite the prevailing conservative view.
DeSantis also brought back the specter of drag queens in explaining why the “woke” military was in trouble.
“They’ve driven off a lot of warriors and recruiting is at a post-Vietnam low. Why is that? It’s because they’re doing social experimentation. They’re doing woke and political ideology. They are taking away from the core mission, and they’re taking their eye off the ball. That is not a military that’s going to be able to stand up to China. It’s not a military, when the Navy is using drag queens to recruit new people, that’s going to be able to defend American freedom abroad. No, that’s a military that’s on the wrong path.”
The Governor also brought back his derisive comic riffs about a certain California city.
“San Francisco–I was there a few weeks ago and you hear different things about San Francisco, there’s–I don’t know if you have ever seen on the internet there’s like a map where they have dots on every place where there’s been public defecation and it like fills up the entire city. It’s like you can’t walk anywhere that’s not somebody having done, you know, done their business on the sidewalk.”
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