Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Spouse’s Hand?

In a marketing campaign filled with strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of heat, Ron DeSantis’s encounter together with his spouse on the presidential main debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night time was one of many extra curious.

Throughout the second business break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the sting of the stage and reached all the way down to shake palms 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 woman.

Did he simply shake his spouse’s hand? Onlookers within the room have been bewildered.

Interactions with spouses on the marketing campaign path might be fraught, even for essentially the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be truthful, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a decent timetable, making an embrace impractical. An excessive amount of affection runs its personal political dangers.

And who is aware of? Perhaps The Handshake was some kind 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 marketing campaign, declined to supply a remark however urged that the story was unimportant 4 days out from the Iowa caucuses.

By some means, illogically, the chaste encounter delivered to thoughts a polar reverse second in marketing campaign historical past: a passionate kiss between Vice President Al Gore and his spouse on the time, Tipper, onstage on the Democratic Nationwide Conference in 2000. (The Kiss was extensively interpreted as an effort by a considerably inflexible candidate to loosen up his public picture. It was additionally a famous distinction to the painful marital developments throughout Invoice Clinton’s second time period.)