In situations like this, I extend the blame first to the previous editors. Someone thought this was worth one of the nicest journalistic properties in the country. Other people agreed. So a reporter was sent to chase this wet dream of the upper echelon. Now, the reporter could have avoided the assignment, but she’s fashion director and chief fashion critic for The New York Times, so that’s what she does for a living. She might as well have come back and said that all her experience on the beat led her to conclude that there’s no damn story here and, well, it’s almost London Fashion Week. But then again, that would imply that someone with considerable experience in the field was questioning the judgment of the editor who came up with this brilliant idea, and, dear people, that it’s just… not… done.
So the reporter goes into the field and returns the story and finds that the story has inevitably led her to produce the worst sentence in the history of political journalism. At this point, dear reader, our only hope is the NYT copy desk, which unfortunately doesn’t realize that the worst sentence in the history of political journalism is right there in the copy like a bank slip of the accused I so were we all dealt with this:
Which means that it is also what Mr. DeSantis called in his recent book, “The courage to be free,” the “Ron and Casey traveling road show,” a Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago via Disney series now going national.
I don’t even know what that means. I mean, I’m clear on the Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago bit, about which sooner. But attaching DeSantis’ name to any Disney connection makes me wonder if the reporter has been to Neptune Fashion Week in the past two years. I hope to see an ugly, angry walrus named Ronnie as the villain in a feature-length Disney animated film before the decade is out.
But it’s the “Camelot-meets-Mar-A-Lago” business that sends this phrase sailing to the top of the worst. I guess we’ll all have to get used to Casey DeSantis, the candidate’s wife and, if some cynical observers in Florida are right, the mastermind of the operation, the same way Angela Lansbury directed James Gregory in The Manchurian Candidate. . Katie Baker of The Daily Beast has a witty report on Team DeSantis and their first trip Iowa on Casey plays a very important role. Apparently, he decided now would be a good time to make a bold fashion statement.
Florida’s First Lady hit the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend with one hideous black leather jacket—an American flag on the front, an alligator and the silhouette of his state on the back, with the mocking words: “Where Woke Goes to Die”—which were not so reminiscent of the racks of a large junk shop in the ‘red state where it would retail for $24.99. To be fair, Casey DeSantis brought the firefighter to a biker charity rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous one.”I really don’t careCoat that the former First Lady wore to check the border crisis.
Baker somehow goes on to guess a more serious political and philosophical meaning to Melania’s coat than Casey’s, which I find a little odd, but hey, if we’re judging the candidate’s wives by their taste in jackets, I guess that can fathom the depths of it, however shallow the shoes 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, cultured woman with unsurpassed taste and elegance. Not only would she never wear something as tacky as DeSantis’ jacket, but she would also be repulsed by the rawness of its message. This was a woman who was not only widely read but, after her days in the White House had ended so brutally, edited books by Bill Moyers, and by Joseph Campbell, the last novel by Dorothy West, and the first in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mafhouz, the Egyptian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Ron DeSantis, with help from his wife, he shows up. the most singularly anti-intellectual presidential campaign since the Know Nothings. Comparing the Kennedy White House to the Trump White House is bad enough, but to imply that the DeSantis campaign is somehow a mish-mash of the two is theatrical critical journalism completely gone, barking mad.
In related news, Maureen Dowd he wrote a good column about Jackie Kennedy’s days as the Washington Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Camera Girl.” (I loved the sight of the future first lady waiting outside the Washington Senators clubhouse to bring the players into her column, and the fact that she permanently appropriates her old scoundrel’s convertible.) Things went from elegiac manner until the inevitable appearance. of Dowd’s beloved Irish police pappy. Author, author!
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
