Amid dueling strategy memos from the Ron DeSantis campaign and the Never Back Down super PAC, the candidate himself is suggesting his approach in Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee boils down to a simple precept.
“Tell the truth,” DeSantis said during a pre-taped interview that ran Monday on Manchester, New Hampshire’s WGIR.
DeSantis slipped into the second person, saying the goal was to “let people know why you want to be President and how you’re going to fix the country.” Then he flashed a stump-speech line.
“We’ve got to send Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware and we’ve got to reverse this country’s decline and we’ll show him how it’s done,” DeSantis vowed.
The humble and straightforward approach here accords more with that outlined by his campaign than his super PAC.
“Viewers at home will see the fighter who volunteered to serve our country and deployed to Iraq after 9/11, the father who wants to restore America’s promise to future generations for his children and theirs, and the champion of freedom who stood up time and again as governor to defeat the left,” wrote Campaign Manager James Uthmeier, in a memo first reported by Axios.
The campaign is “fully prepared for Governor DeSantis to be the center of attacks and on the receiving end of false, desperate charges from other candidates and the legacy media,” Uthmeier added. The “competitors have to go down this road,” he added, “because this is a two-man race for the Republican nomination between Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump.”
Uthmeier’s counsel offers contrast to the fiery approach recommended by Never Back Down, which includes advice to take a “sledgehammer” against Vivek Ramaswamy as “Vivek the Fake,” and an urging to defend the absent Trump against attacks from Chris Christie.
Neither the memos nor DeSantis’ brief interview that aired Monday addressed the Governor discussing certain Trump backers as “listless vessels” in an interview that ran last week. Expect the aforementioned Ramaswamy and perhaps others to challenge DeSantis on that framing on the debate stage Wednesday night.
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