The left's anti-DeSantis line emerges: he's a "divider."

It beats arguing with him.

The mainstream media, having misrepresented Ron DeSantis’ position on the war in Ukraine, has moved on to its core anti-DeSantis attack — he’s a divider, not a uniter. Dan Balz peddles this theme for the Washington Post in an article called “DeSantis plays on America’s divisions as he readies 2024 campaign.”

Among its other flaws, Balz’s piece overlooks the fact that it’s the job of a governor to root out policies he believes are harmful to his state, and the job of a presidential candidate to denounce policies he believes are harmful to the nation. Governors who want to make a difference, rather than just be reelected, do the former. All presidential candidates running against an incumbent do the latter.

Balz contrasts DeSantis with Barack Obama who, in 2004, declared that “there is not a liberal America or a conservative America; there is the United States of America.” But in 2004, Obama was neither governing anything nor a candidate for president. He was just a guy trying to make a splash in his first prime time television appearance.

The insincerity of Obama’s remark would become apparent once he entered presidential politics and even more so when he became president. Obama attempted to overhaul America’s health care system without any Republican support and to rewrite immigration policy without the consent of Congress. And his 2012 campaign vilified Mitt Romney as a wrecker of lives (based on his role at Bain Capital) and as an enemy of women (because he boasted that, as governor, he had binders of women from which he selected candidates for high-level jobs in Massachusetts). This is the work of a divider.

In DeSantis’ case, what Balz calls “playing on America’s divisions” is nothing more than denouncing in no uncertain terms the stunningly divisive left-liberal policies that Democrats have imposed or tolerated. These policies include the disastrous locking down of America’s schools; teaching K-12 students that America is “systemically racist,” i.e. evil (what could be more divisive than that?); failing to enforce our border even as drugs flood in from Mexico; demonizing the police and cutting back police funding; and lenient treatment of criminals.

All of these policies break sharply from traditional American approaches or values. Whatever merit they may have (I see none), they are bound to divide the country and they cry out for pushback.

To attack DeSantis for pushing back hard is to say that conservatives must tolerate without fuss the radical transformation of America. But it is the duty of governors and presidential candidates to present the country with an alternative to such a transformation. Let the people decide, not left-wing bureaucrats supported by their media pals.

So far, I haven’t challenged the claim that, in presenting America with an alternative to the torpedoing of their traditions and values, DeSantis is being “divisive.” But it’s fair to question how divisive he’s being.

How many Americans wanted the door to their children’s schools to be closed for a year or more due to a virus that posed essentially no risk of severe illness to kids and minimal risk to most teachers? How many want funding of the police to be slashed?

What percentage wants K-12 students to be taught that America is racist? What percentage wants our borders to be as open as they are?

And how divisive, really, is a governor who was just reelected with almost 60 percent of the vote in a state that, until his emergence, was nearly as Democratic as Republican?

The problem for Balz and his fellow partisan media members isn’t that DeSantis is divisive. It’s that DeSantis is on the popular side of the issues he focuses on. It would be a losing battle politically for Balz and others to argue with the governor about the merits of most of these issues. So instead, they attack him for being divisive.

They know a threat to their orthodoxy when they see one.