Ron DeSantis’ debate choice of favorite President is ‘one that people don’t talk about much’

Asked to choose an inspirational President at this week’s debate, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pick is not one that has roused much talk of a Mount Rushmore annex — even if he was in office when they started chiseling.

President Calvin Coolidge, DeSantis said, “got just about everything right.”

His fellow debaters made choices that need not get Google working so hard.

Former United Nations Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley perhaps got greedy and picked two: founding President George Washington and the man credited with saving the nation, President Abraham Lincoln. Vivek Ramaswamy picked another immortalized in rock: President Thomas Jefferson. And Chris Christie went with a modern Republican hero in President Ronald Reagan.

With Reagan, Washington and Lincoln taken by his turn, DeSantis — the Yale University history major and a former history teacher — mentioned Coolidge.

“People don’t talk about him a lot,” DeSantis said.

But that choice served up an opportunity for DeSantis to dive into what a dim view the 30th President would have of the current state of affairs.

“We need to restore the U.S. Constitution as the centerpiece of our national life,” DeSantis said. “And that requires a President who understands the original understanding of the Constitution … who knows how we’ve gone off track with this massive fourth branch of government, this administrative state which is imposing its will on us and is being weaponized against us.”

Coolidge, who got the job when President Warren Harding died, presided over an economic heyday — the Roaring ‘20s — perhaps made possible by low taxes and deregulation. Coolidge largely escapes blame for the Great Depression, which followed eight months after he left office. He is also credited with signing the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas for immigrants based on country of origin, completely excluding immigrants from Asia.

“Silent Cal knew the proper role of the federal government,” DeSantis said as he asserted that the country was in “great shape” when he was President. 

That choice produced some scoffing from Coolidge’s native state of Vermont. Garrison Nelson, retired from 50 years as a political science professor at the University of Vermont, said that Coolidge, elected President once in his own right, was hardly a standout in the pantheon of Presidents.

Nelson’s latest book, “John William McCormack: A Political Biography,” focuses on a Massachusetts politician elected the year before Coolidge left office, later ascending to Speaker of the House. Nelson has been interviewed thousands of times, as Vermonters former Gov. Howard Dean and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders pursued the presidency.

“He was as colorless as tapioca,” Nelson said of Coolidge.

Later, at an appearance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Thursday, DeSantis expounded further on his Coolidge fandom, waving away his pick’s proximity to perhaps the country’s worst economic cataclysm that first hit Wall Street as a Black Tuesday in October 1929.

“And then of course, they eventually had under Hoover, the Great Depression,” DeSantis said. “Had Coolidge been in there, they probably would have gotten through that much better because he was just really, really good.”

Nelson’s reading of history implies it wasn’t just a taciturn nature that earned Coolidge the sobriquet “Silent Cal.”

“He slept half the day,” Nelson said. “He was probably the laziest President ever.”