The New York Times has two reports on how the Republican presidential contenders spent their July 4, and you will win no prizes for correctly guessing that the states of Iowa and New Hampshire were inundated with would-be presidents to the point where residents had to swat them off like flies, while leading seditionist Donald Trump sat at home firing off yet more angry messages about take-your-pick.
It's not quite clear how the tradition began, but evidently if you're a presidential candidate the absolutely best way to celebrate the Fourth of July is to appear in a New Hampshire or Iowa parade, letting the general public get a taste of the very best thing America has to offer: yourself. Usually there is at least a bit of organization involved in putting on a parade, and if you're going to march in one then organizers will want to know whether you're the kind of marchers with trumpets or the kind with horses or the kind that putter around in incongruously tiny cars, but if you say you're a presidential candidate you can just show up and they'll slot you in.
So Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hustled himself into two New Hampshire parades on July 4, marching in jeans with his wife and a child that may or may not be his own and with a group of The Whitest People You Know. Apparently the DeSantis campaign wants to really shove it in our faces that the candidate's technicians were able to get his lower-body hydraulics working again, even after so many of us opined that there was no way to do that that didn't risk a catastrophic failure that would spray hot oil all over the assembled crowd; fine, point taken. DeSantis did not explode.
It did, however, rain on Ron DeSantis' parade—in a literal sense. The Times reports that he and back-of-the-pack competitor Sen. Tim Scott got "soaked" before making it to the end of parade route No. 2.
The Times produced two separate articles on how the Republican candidates spent their holiday. Reporters Jazmine Ulloa and Jonathan Weisman teamed up to write both.
The Weisman version, which focuses on Donald Trump being absent from the festivities and is filled with quotes and commentary probing how Trump's ass-sitting will itself affect the race, is the standard Times fare. It's the version of the Times that centers Trump, not as seditionist criminal nuisance but still and forever as "candidate," so incessantly that even if Trump parks himself in his bedroom eating McDonalds cheeseburgers for the day, we're still going to hear about what it means for the race.
The report in which Jazmine Ulloa took the lead, however, is far richer in on-the-ground detail. It also adds in lines that the Times hardly ever allows:
Holy heck, that made it past a New York Times editor. Readers get told that Trump's social media posts were vulgar, straight out, rather than couching it in critics say or ringing up a Democrat to opine that vulgar is vulgar. Minions and bulky are both wonderfully arch, in the way that newspapers were willing to be back before the current trend of enforced content-stripping blandness, and so Ulloa's probably going to get hauled in front of somebody's desk for having The Sheer Audacity.
We open with a vignette of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum stumping as presidential candidate, and it's not likely that even one in 50 readers would even know Burgum was running except for it being mentioned here.
Mike Pence makes his own cameo appearance, and it's straight to the point.
See there? The news of what happened, livened up with a lovely little story about child abuse.
Imagine lying dazed in a crib at night with a poster of Donald Freaking Trump staring at you. Imagine growing up with that. You'd end up being afraid of clowns for sure, and a few other things besides. But:
Thank you again! Erroneous is the necessary word here; there's no need to couch it or shade it or pretend that it takes all kinds when it comes to interpreting reality as we know it. It used to be that when political reporters got color quotes from the common rabble it was deemed appropriate to point out to readers when a quote provider was saying something completely and dangerously wrong. These days the odds are 50-50 at best.
I'd still push for false rather than erroneous, and if you're willing to note that the short-fingered vulgarian in chief is vulgar than you might as well add in hoax or conspiracy theory somewhere here, to bring home the point that this "belief" is being peddled by malevolent cranks "pushing" a transparently seditious act, but we'll take it.
Thank you yet again. That's good reporting, right there. It's not that Ron DeSantis is only gloriously gracing the little people with his presence; it's useful to know that the little people being graced are getting their eyeful of DeSantis somewhere between a dance routine and a parade float full of actual clowns.
How could any reporter stumble on that scene and not report it in all its detail? It's glorious. It's informative. In one sentence, we've gotten the whole mood of the day.
As for the actual news, I'm personally skeptical that getting soaked to the skin on somebody else's parade route is the path to the White House that it might once have been. The point of it is that Iowa and New Hampshire continue to jealously guard their claims to being the Only Important States when it comes to kicking off presidential bids, and so candidates are obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time in each simply to placate primary voters and caucus-goers who would take it as an outright insult if you didn't make the trip.
Is it worth rusting out Ron DeSantis' core components? That's less clear. And no, it's not really news that Donald Trump didn't walk in any parades, because nobody can imagine Donald Trump could walk more than 50 yards or so before getting pissed off and demanding that the clown float be de-clowned and given to him instead.
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It's not quite clear how the tradition began, but evidently if you're a presidential candidate the absolutely best way to celebrate the Fourth of July is to appear in a New Hampshire or Iowa parade, letting the general public get a taste of the very best thing America has to offer: yourself. Usually there is at least a bit of organization involved in putting on a parade, and if you're going to march in one then organizers will want to know whether you're the kind of marchers with trumpets or the kind with horses or the kind that putter around in incongruously tiny cars, but if you say you're a presidential candidate you can just show up and they'll slot you in.
So Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hustled himself into two New Hampshire parades on July 4, marching in jeans with his wife and a child that may or may not be his own and with a group of The Whitest People You Know. Apparently the DeSantis campaign wants to really shove it in our faces that the candidate's technicians were able to get his lower-body hydraulics working again, even after so many of us opined that there was no way to do that that didn't risk a catastrophic failure that would spray hot oil all over the assembled crowd; fine, point taken. DeSantis did not explode.
It did, however, rain on Ron DeSantis' parade—in a literal sense. The Times reports that he and back-of-the-pack competitor Sen. Tim Scott got "soaked" before making it to the end of parade route No. 2.
The Times produced two separate articles on how the Republican candidates spent their holiday. Reporters Jazmine Ulloa and Jonathan Weisman teamed up to write both.
The Weisman version, which focuses on Donald Trump being absent from the festivities and is filled with quotes and commentary probing how Trump's ass-sitting will itself affect the race, is the standard Times fare. It's the version of the Times that centers Trump, not as seditionist criminal nuisance but still and forever as "candidate," so incessantly that even if Trump parks himself in his bedroom eating McDonalds cheeseburgers for the day, we're still going to hear about what it means for the race.
The report in which Jazmine Ulloa took the lead, however, is far richer in on-the-ground detail. It also adds in lines that the Times hardly ever allows:
Holy heck, that made it past a New York Times editor. Readers get told that Trump's social media posts were vulgar, straight out, rather than couching it in critics say or ringing up a Democrat to opine that vulgar is vulgar. Minions and bulky are both wonderfully arch, in the way that newspapers were willing to be back before the current trend of enforced content-stripping blandness, and so Ulloa's probably going to get hauled in front of somebody's desk for having The Sheer Audacity.
We open with a vignette of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum stumping as presidential candidate, and it's not likely that even one in 50 readers would even know Burgum was running except for it being mentioned here.
Mike Pence makes his own cameo appearance, and it's straight to the point.
See there? The news of what happened, livened up with a lovely little story about child abuse.
Imagine lying dazed in a crib at night with a poster of Donald Freaking Trump staring at you. Imagine growing up with that. You'd end up being afraid of clowns for sure, and a few other things besides. But:
Thank you again! Erroneous is the necessary word here; there's no need to couch it or shade it or pretend that it takes all kinds when it comes to interpreting reality as we know it. It used to be that when political reporters got color quotes from the common rabble it was deemed appropriate to point out to readers when a quote provider was saying something completely and dangerously wrong. These days the odds are 50-50 at best.
I'd still push for false rather than erroneous, and if you're willing to note that the short-fingered vulgarian in chief is vulgar than you might as well add in hoax or conspiracy theory somewhere here, to bring home the point that this "belief" is being peddled by malevolent cranks "pushing" a transparently seditious act, but we'll take it.
Thank you yet again. That's good reporting, right there. It's not that Ron DeSantis is only gloriously gracing the little people with his presence; it's useful to know that the little people being graced are getting their eyeful of DeSantis somewhere between a dance routine and a parade float full of actual clowns.
How could any reporter stumble on that scene and not report it in all its detail? It's glorious. It's informative. In one sentence, we've gotten the whole mood of the day.
As for the actual news, I'm personally skeptical that getting soaked to the skin on somebody else's parade route is the path to the White House that it might once have been. The point of it is that Iowa and New Hampshire continue to jealously guard their claims to being the Only Important States when it comes to kicking off presidential bids, and so candidates are obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time in each simply to placate primary voters and caucus-goers who would take it as an outright insult if you didn't make the trip.
Is it worth rusting out Ron DeSantis' core components? That's less clear. And no, it's not really news that Donald Trump didn't walk in any parades, because nobody can imagine Donald Trump could walk more than 50 yards or so before getting pissed off and demanding that the clown float be de-clowned and given to him instead.
RELATED STORIES:
DeSantis War Room posts anti-gay, anti-Trump ad so awful it's got to be self-parody
MAGA grassroots voters render anti-Trump GOP donors powerless
The only thing funnier than the RNC loyalty pledge is candidate reactions to it