Rick Wilson Nails DeSantis ‘Electile Dysfunction’ Needs ‘Political Viagra’

History rhymes and now we’re going to go into a mad jazz riff of 2016, with melodious strains from as far back as 1858. You thought 2016 was cacophonous and discordant? Wait until the debates start. They’re set up right now to be the most contentious debates possibly ever in our history due to how split the GOP is. They might be reminiscent of the famed seven debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Then it was the Democratic party that was in tatters and the Republican party was brand spanking new. Don’t put a lot of stock in labels, put your faith in the merchandise.

Michael Steele, on a panel with Rick Wilson, Matthew Dowd and Debbie Marcasel-Powell, pointed out the salient feature of 2016, which was the belief amongst all the candidates that Donald Trump would go down in flames and then one of them would stumble out of the pack, miraculously consolidate all the votes, and move on to the nomination.

“If Donald Trump is somehow eaten by a shark, struck by lightning or somehow put in jail, who knows?” quipped Rick Wilson. But if he’s not, then he is going to sail through to the nomination because nobody will fight him.

This is the amazing thing, that people like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott have no intention of fighting Trump, because they’re hoping for the VP nomination. Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie will fight him, so there will be some color, especially from Christie. But neither of them have a prayer towards getting the actual nomination.

Then we go to the once-favorite son, the briefly favorite son we should say, Ron DeSantis, whom a lot of people fear has already blown it. Wilson says DeSantis “is a coward” and won’t attack Trump. No fireworks there, unless DeSantis’ strategy really changes.

This is an eight-minute clip. The whole thing is worth the listen, but if you want specifically to get into the Steele-Wilson dynamic, talking about DeSantis, start at minute 5:00.

The “political Viagra” needed, if I’m understanding this clearly, would be the equivalent of an android revamp like they did on Westworld. If the robot was shaking, sputtering, not performing up to snuff they took it offline and rehabbed it. Would that it were that simple for DeSantis. Because if anybody needs to to able to register human emotion intelligibly, react civilly and in a perfect world, persuasively, and win people over, it is DeSantis. And he needs it yesterday.

Right now the man is vapid and vague. When asked recently by a reporter how he was going to close the gap between how he’s polling and how Trump is leading, DeSantis said. “Watch and learn how we’re going to do it.” It’s rabbit in the hat time. DeSantis has no answers, so like Trump with his 24-hours to quit Ukraine nonsense, he’s just going to allude to a magic, secret formula when he has none.

Maybe one will appear. Or, maybe the DeSantis campaign will continue to lay off people, the polls will continue to show DeSantis going nowhere, and then at some point, the big money will accept the inevitable and say, “Okay, looks like it’s Trump. Again.”

It may simply be too late for DeSantis. Like Viagra, you need to take it at the right time, before you have sex, not realize that you should have taken it months down the road. But this isn’t all that surprising. It was well established from the beginning that the plan for DeSantis to run for president was hatched between himself and his wife and with little or no outside input from experts. Now, they’re finding out the hard way, as the campaign burns through money and the cold hard fact remains that DeSantis has moved the needle only .04% since he announced his candidacy, that they should have done things differently.

It looks like DeSantis is on his way to join Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker. Wow.

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