Stiffening Republican spines

Youngkin also signed anti-CRT executive orders and rejected neighboring Washington, D.C.’s mandate-centric strategy of dealing with COVID-19. CNN’s Jim Acosta blasted Virginia as a “police state.” There was incredulity that Youngkin was governing as he had campaigned.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is perhaps the most prominent example of this trend. He withstood a full-scale media assault on his approach to the pandemic, which concentrated on the vulnerable while leaving much of the rest of the state open. Every time a COVID-19 wave hit Florida, the headlines were withering, followed by a period of relative silence each time the wave receded.

Vanity Fair dubbed DeSantis an “angel of death.” The New York Times’s Charles Blow asked DeSantis, “How many COVID deaths are enough?” (No such query was extended to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) A Daily Beast story was headlined, “58,000 Dead, and Depraved DeSantis Is Just Getting Started.”

The discourse is little different than the refurbished Resistance christening the Florida governor “Death Santis.” But he has not only taken the derogation in stride — DeSantis clearly views the sparring as a political plus.

“Now, look, when you’re over the target, they’re gonna come at ya. But what I view it as, I view it as positive feedback,” DeSantis told conservative talk show host Mark Levin. “If the corporate press nationally isn’t attacking me, then I’m probably not doing my job. So, the fact that they are attacking me is a good indication that I’m tackling the big issues.”

One veteran Republican operative in Washington, D.C., concurred with DeSantis’s assessment. “I advise my clients to view negative press from places like the New York Times the same way as they’d view a nice piece in a conservative mag,” the operative said.

DeSantis isn’t grappling with media critics alone. His sidekick in this fight, his top spokeswoman Christina Pushaw, similarly relishes verbal and online jousting. Her biography in her personal Twitter account says she is on the site “to debunk false Narratives” about Florida and its governor. As liberal jurisdictions have begun to ease their masking and other restrictions, she has asked where DeSantis can go to get his apology.

Conservative complaints about liberal media bias are nothing new. Longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather was described as “Rather Biased” years before his career was effectively ended by an erroneous story about President George W. Bush’s military record. A popular bumper sticker during the 1992 presidential campaign made the case for Bush’s father: “Annoy the media — reelect Bush.”

Vice President Spiro Agnew frequently blasted the press in speeches, many of them written by culture war pugilist Pat Buchanan. “Some newspapers are only fit to line the bottom of bird cages,” Agnew once said. He wasn’t much kinder toward other forms of media. “A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news,” Agnew remarked. “A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture.”

If these comments preview later Republican pronouncements calling the corporate press “the enemy of the American people,” Agnew was also years ahead of what would become a major conservative debate over the media and Big Tech.

“I am not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship,” Agnew said. “I am asking whether a kind of censorship already exists when the news that 40 million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases.”

These words could easily be spoken today by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, except they would be revised to include references to Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg.

What has changed is not conservative complaints about the media but Republicans’ willingness to try to overcome perceived biases by ingratiating themselves with those who buy ink (or pixels) by the barrel. When successful, the late conservative writer Tom Bethell deemed the resultant coverage “strange new respect” — the phenomenon by which Republicans and erstwhile conservatives could gain favorable media treatment for themselves by sacrificing other members of their party or showing signs of “growth” in the left-wing direction.

Republican politicians are beginning to reject this mentality.

“Too long, for many of these Republicans, they would always defer to the corporate media,” DeSantis said on a conservative podcast. “They would try to impress the corporate media. Don’t work with them. You’ve got to beat them. You’ve got to fight back against them.” Even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, got into the act with a heated exchange with NPR while serving as chief diplomat.

To be sure, many Republicans have gained MSNBC contributorships and prominence on newspaper op-ed pages with their fervent denunciations of former President Donald Trump. But whatever success they gain from these inroads with the liberal media comes at the cost of any credibility with the conservatives who were their former audience. A Jennifer Rubin column in the Washington Post may be retweeted by Biden chief of staff Ron Klain but tells the reader as much about the state of conservative opinion as an entry on the Daily Kos.

It was the experience of a Republican leader many of these castaways worked for or supported that hardened the conservative mood against strange new respect: the late Sen. John McCain. Accessible, by turns affable and irascible, McCain was a joy for campaign reporters to cover. During his 2000 presidential run, they boarded his “Straight Talk Express” bus and hit the trail with the quotable candidate riding alongside them.

The coverage clearly helped McCain rise from the pack and become Bush’s main rival for the nomination. But it also put a ceiling on his support from rank-and-file Republicans, making it difficult to prevail in closed primaries and caucuses. His quotes about the Christian Right were gold for reporters, but kryptonite in South Carolina, where Bush effectively sealed the Arizona lawmaker’s fate in that race. There was a conservative coalescence around Bush against McCain’s candidacy.

It also became clear that McCain’s most favorable coverage — the “maverick” label — came when he could be used as a cudgel with which to beat other Republicans. When McCain defended conservative positions, the press treatment became more hostile and difficult to distinguish from reporting about other GOP figures. When McCain finally won the Republican nomination in 2008 and opposed the new media darling Barack Obama, the friendly reporters were no longer at his disposal.

“John McCain: warrior or warmonger?” asked the Economist in a headline during that campaign. Rolling Stone published a feature taking back all the “maverick” praise that had been ubiquitous while running against Bush rather than Obama. “It’s a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington,” Tim Dickinson wrote in the piece. “But during the course of this year’s campaign, the mask has slipped.” Dickinson said that the much-maligned Bush “was a much better pilot” than McCain.

“This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself,” Dickinson wrote. “Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness.” Left unmentioned was the media’s role in cultivating McCain’s image and then undermining it, which became the theme of the rest of his career. In his final years in the Senate, McCain was either a villain or a maverick depending on where he stood on Obamacare repeal at the moment. He died a quotable Trump critic, once again redeeming himself in the eyes of many a fickle scribe.

Grassroots Republicans were becoming increasingly disillusioned by their leadership and the party’s governing class during this time period. They felt that both McCain and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney left salient attacks on Obama, whom they viewed as a beatable candidate, on the table to remain in the good graces of the Beltway media. There was a growing sense that many Republicans were less interested in winning than in losing graciously and showing magnanimity in defeat.

There were flickers of outrage from the Republican primary electorate. In 2012, a revolving door of conservative candidates deemed unelectable by the conventional wisdom briefly surged to the lead in national polls and early states. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich won South Carolina largely on the strength of a debate performance in which he rebuked a moderator who asked about his marriage. Politico called it the “John King-Newt Gingrich debate.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wasn’t necessarily the most conservative chief executive in the country. He had to make some of the compromises necessary to win in a blue state. But unlike Maryland’s Larry Hogan or Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker, who are more popular with independents and crossover Democrats than the Right nationally, Christie became a viral video star because of his confrontations with teachers union members.

Republicans were hungry for leaders who were unafraid of being called racists and would instead turn the tables on their detractors, candidates who were uninterested in currying favor with a media they increasingly regarded as openly contemptuous of their values. Enter Trump, who ended up beating 16 more conventional Republicans en route to the GOP nomination and the White House in 2016. Jeb Bush, the establishment candidate in that contest, was branded as “low energy,” was painted as pleading “please clap,” was rebuffed when he angrily demanded Trump apologize to his wife, was reliant on a presidential brother whom the base once adored but was now seen trading confectioneries with Michelle Obama — and barely registered.

The loss of the White House in 2020 did not soften the Republican demand for aggressive leadership and an adversarial relationship with the press. DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, and other red-state governors have resisted the Biden administration on COVID, tax cuts, and energy. By contrast, when South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem opposed legislation intended to protect girls’ sports from transgender ideology, the reaction from conservatives was fierce. Noem was notably quicker to align with social conservatives over a stalled “heartbeat” abortion law.

When one red state passes a law restricting abortion, another follows. They are emulating one another on mask mandates and vaccine passports. They are doing the same on critical race theory, transgender issues, even attempts to address the crisis at the southwestern border. A Republican consultant advising candidates in some of these states for the midterm elections described it as a “healthy competition.”

If anything, the pandemic has deepened the sense among the Republican faithful that their freedoms are at risk. Beleaguered by popular culture, marginalized in public schools, watching the corporations whose taxes they cut boycotting their states over conservative voting or abortion laws, and now facing a web of mandates restricting their personal behavior in ways that were unthinkable prior to the start of COVID, more and more, these voters are looking to their elected officials to defend their interests as well as their ideology.

“But he fights!” was the motto of Republicans sticking by the former president no matter what controversies or distractions were dominating the cable news chyrons at the time. A new generation of Republicans is attempting to demonstrate that this phrase can apply to them as well, with the hope of fewer self-inflicted wounds. Primary voters have revealed they will no longer give out the GOP’s presidential nomination to elder statesmen like a gold watch at a retirement party, a habit the Democrats have since acquired.

Will they be able to deliver? Republican voters will be watching their political class closely.

W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.