Their businesslike grasp of hands set off chatter at Wednesday’s debate — and showed the risks of interacting with your family when you’re a presidential candidate.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida shaking the hand of his wife, Casey DeSantis, during a Republican presidential primary debate at Drake University in Des Moines on Wednesday.
In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.
During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.
Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.
Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.
And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).
Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, declined to provide a comment but suggested that the story was unimportant four days out from the Iowa caucuses.
Somehow, illogically, the chaste encounter brought to mind a polar opposite moment in campaign history: a passionate kiss between Vice President Al Gore and his wife at the time, Tipper, onstage at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. (The Kiss was widely interpreted as an effort by a somewhat rigid candidate to loosen up his public image. It was also a noted contrast to the painful marital developments during Bill Clinton’s second term.)
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Source: nytimes.com
