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On leaking...


DeSantis Charms GOP By Condemning 'Leaks' And 'Palace Intrigue'

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

On its face, there wasn’t anything unusual about the email that landed
last week in the press office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Background interview request from the Washington Post,” read the
subject line that summarized the industry-standard process whereby
information is shared with reporters under pre-negotiated terms,
usually anonymity. When sanctioned by a politician or their team, it
is called “going on background” to shape and broaden a story with
additional facts and contexts but without direct attribution. When not
sanctioned, well, then that is just called leaking.

Either way, Jeremy Redfern wasn’t interested. The DeSantis spokesman
wrote back one word: “No.”

A screenshot of the exchange went viral with the consensus in more
conservative corners of Twitter being that a liberal rag, albeit the
beltway paper of record, had just been owned. The score in their
minds? DeSantis: 1, WaPo: 0.

The little episode does underscore a larger, still emerging theme of
the expected DeSantis presidential campaign. It isn’t just that the
team that didn’t leak in Florida wouldn’t leak in the White House. The
implication is that DeSantis would not obsess over what is written
about him in news outlets most of his constituents don’t read, because
such an obsession is counterproductive to conservative goals. In this
way, DeSantis may prove to be the anti-chaos candidate.

DeSantis has hinted at all of this during a recent book tour, a
closely watched exercise that seems to be a dress rehearsal for a
White House run. “There’s no drama in our administration,” he said on
stage in Iowa next to Gov. Kim Reynolds. “There’s no palace intrigue.”
The juxtaposition with the frontrunner in the GOP primary, former
President Donald Trump, was implicit and obvious.

“We made very clear to the people working in the administration,
you’re not going to be leaking,” DeSantis said, recalling how he told
his staff early on that if they had “any other agenda” than “doing
business of the people of Florida” then they might as well “pack your
bags right now.”

With a unified team onboard with that mission, DeSantis continued, “We
roll out, and we execute, and we do things, and we get things done.
And in the process, we beat the left day after day, week after week,
month after month, year after year.”

Republicans have made the media their foil for decades now. Newt
Gingrich won over South Carolina voters during the 2012 Republican
primary when the former House speaker slammed a CNN debate moderator
over what he considered “despicable” questioning, arguing that the
“destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes
it harder to govern this country.” Gingrich would lose the nomination
but leave behind a blueprint that Trump would embody. Conservatives
loved how he hated the “fake news.” But few were aware of the strange
symbiosis that enveloped his administration.

Trump gave as good as he got during press conferences, but his team
was set against itself at times, and often consumed by the media at
the expense of the administration’s mission. His son-in-law, a senior
advisor in the last White House, said as much. The war between Jared
Kushner and Steven Bannon was infamous in the West Wing and
well-documented in the papers. Albeit almost always “on background.”

When Bannon was eventually fired, Kushner later wrote in his
autobiography, another senior aide came to him joking that he had “a
plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope [Hicks], you
leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the
Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times,
and ... we’re done.”

Careers were catapulted and journalism prizes won on the ability to
get the president’s inner circle to text back by deadline. Even when
the headlines would be negative, Trump often called reporters
directly. He still does. “I love being with her,” Trump said of Maggie
Haberman during one of his multiple interviews with the star New York
Times reporter. As president, he blasted her publicly as “a third-rate
reporter.” After leaving the White House, he called her “my
psychiatrist.”

The Trump cabinet didn’t just jockey for position in the press.
Internal divisions were so extreme that officials would gauge their
standing with the president by recent headlines or Fox News hits.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even made a joke of the
dysfunction, promising that he would stay on in the administration
“until he tweets me out of office.”

Trump was a bellicose president, and his base adored him for it. Some
of his closest advisors still worried that an obsession with settling
scores left him off balance. For instance, during the job interview
for attorney general, Bill Barr reported that he told Trump that “the
problem with immediately counterpunching ... is that you are letting
your opponents pick the time and place of the fight.” Trump, Barr
later wrote in his memoir, didn’t seem to take the advice. But
DeSantis has.

The governor can be as pugnacious as the former president, and YouTube
is full of clips from DeSantis fans and from the press chronicling his
blow-for-blow battles with reporters. He has catapulted himself into
the national conversation, in large part, through those fights with
the media that he has labeled “the liberal elite’s Praetorian Guard.”

But the same reporters who enjoyed unprecedented access to Trump,
possibly the most accessible president in modern history, have had a
hard time getting ahold of DeSantis outside of his regular news
conferences, leaving the New York Times to ask “Can Ron DeSantis Avoid
Meeting the Press?”

“The old way of looking at it is: ‘I have to do every media hit that I
possibly can, from as broad a political spectrum as I can, to reach as
many people as possible,’” Nick Iarossi, a longtime DeSantis supporter
and a lobbyist in Tallahassee, told the Times. “The new way of looking
at it is: ‘I really don’t need to do that anymore. I can control how I
want to message to voters through the mediums I choose.’”

DeSantis has followed an aggressive but more calculated blueprint,
becoming a conservative media darling through frequent appearances on
Fox News with Tucker Carlson and the Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro. It
has been enough to bring him alongside Trump in the RealClearPolitics
Average even though he has not yet declared. Trump remains the clear
front runner with a 14.4-point advantage.

Mick Mulvaney doesn’t see much unique in the current DeSantis
approach. He knows both men well. Mulvaney was a founding member of
the House Freedom Caucus with DeSantis before leaving Congress to join
the Trump administration, first as director of the Office of
Management and Budget and later as his second-to-last chief of staff.
If the boast about avoiding “palace intrigue” and the admonishment not
to leak become campaign promises, Mulvaney doesn’t see a clear
competitive advantage. “I expect all of the challengers,” he told RCP,
“to use a variation on the ‘Trump policies without the Trump baggage’
message.”

Disdain for the press has indeed become a feature of the right.
According to Gallup, just 14% of Republicans say they have “a great
deal or fair amount of confidence” in the media. Gripes among
conservatives have turned from occasional complaints to the outright
belief that a biased press is an enemy to their way of life.

Candidates see that, and they will say they don’t trust elite media,
Tucker Carlson told the 2022 Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines,
Iowa, last year. But figuring out who is play fighting with the press
versus those who will shun them altogether, the Fox News host added,
was critical to earning their vote. “You need to be really wary of
candidates who care what the New York Times thinks. You really, really
do,” he said. “And if you say that to Republican voters, they are
like, ‘The New York Times is Communist! I don't even read it!’ Really?
Because your leaders do. And they really care. They really, really
care.”

DeSantis was happy to blast the press in Iowa last week. Like many
Republicans, he has shown a willingness to punch back. Unlike some
others though, he has a demonstrated ability to ignore their calls.
“Don’t think that they’re coming to you in good faith,” he said in one
broadside against the press. “They’re coming to you to be able to
advance their agenda, and if you’re somebody that’s standing for our
values, like Kim and me stand for, you are an impediment to their
agenda.”

“So don’t play into it. Just speak the truth. Do your thing,” he
continued before counseling that conservatives should “not give them
the satisfaction that they are some type of neutral gatekeepers
because they are not.”