Tough and talented, the long-shot candidate has earned respect.
While Republican affairs can certainly get rough and unseemly at times, it’s usually the Democratic Party we can turn to for lessons in cold, unsentimental power politics. Consider, for instance, the reception accorded by the party establishment and like-minded reporters to an unexpected entrant into the 2024 presidential race, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who rates, one might have supposed, the respect due a worthy contender and honest dissenter.
After declaring his candidacy last month, RFK Jr. immediately showed at 14 percent in polls. Mild alarm followed, among supporters of President Biden, when two weeks later the next round of polling gave Kennedy an average of 20 percent. You could tell this was a bit of a shock because, almost instantly, the Washington Post dismissed it as nothing, in a hurried item headlined “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Threat to Biden Is Inflated. Here’s Why.”
As surely as any Kennedy could once expect to be fawned over by Post reporters, this Kennedy — especially if he starts drawing crowds and votes — is never to be spared condescension and rebuke. The “why,” in case you haven’t heard, is that RFK Jr. has in recent years been airing “controversial,” “dangerous” views, and this makes him, says the Post, a “fringe figure” you needn’t take seriously.
Among his many provocations: Kennedy claims that pandemic lockdowns were calamitous for working people and for children; that citizens should choose for themselves whether to receive vaccines; that corporate influences on government are pervasive and corrupting; and that censorship contrived by the state is intolerable. Worse even than these outrages, during the pandemic this man called into question the conduct and veracity of Anthony Fauci. And this offense — challenging Doctor Fauci! — is still regarded as the most shameful assault on science since the persecution of Galileo.
It doesn’t matter that, point for point, RFK Jr. makes a strong case and most everyone knows it. His problem is, the prohibition on saying such things has not been lifted. A well-established, scientifically tested, and empirically proven phenomenon known as liberal groupthink has set in, preempting even the most obvious conclusions. So, even if Kennedy’s presidential bid is off to an impressive start, in the Post’s analysis he is still relegated to the same category as “fringe figure Lyndon LaRouche,” who — trivia time for Post readers — “in 1996 managed to pull double digits in some primary states.”
The New York Times, in its version of the LaRouche treatment, likewise left the impression of a candidate’s announcement speech strangely and single-mindedly focused on “shaking Americans’ faith in science,” no matter that the candidate himself had said nothing at all along those lines, and no matter that in all of his scientific arguments he cites scientific methods and scientific evidence. Here again the day’s news was predetermined: casting the accomplished son and namesake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy as just another sorry entry in “a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.” Having thus alerted readers that the new candidate with the familiar name is basically a head case, the Post and Times can now put that name back on the blacklist, denying Kennedy coverage unless he troubles them further by rising in polls or by making crazy demands for primary debates.
As if this didn’t paint a sad enough picture, we’re reminded in practically every story about RFK Jr. that his extended family has been left in anguish over the campaign and the “embarrassment” it has caused. Longtime Washington columnist Albert Hunt, writing in the tone of a concerned family friend relaying word straight from Hyannisport, explains: “The opposition [to RFK Jr.] of most of the Kennedy clan is unprecedented, as a core tenet — dating back to the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy — is unquestioned family loyalty.” “While embarrassing,” Hunt assures us, “this isn’t going to tarnish the Kennedy legacy.” And although RFK Jr.’s campaign is “personally painful” to relatives, it’s comforting to know “he has no chance to be the Democratic nominee.”
But let’s think. Perhaps there is a way of healing this rift. I seem to recall another core tenet passed down by the patriarch — that winning is everything. We can easily imagine the clan all together again on stage in the event RFK Jr. has beaten the odds and claimed the family’s first presidential primary victories in 44 years, a feat entirely within his reach — and, of course, the occasion for all this intraparty anxiety.
That folks around the DNC know he has a chance, in New Hampshire and beyond, can be surmised from reports of chatter about a backup plan involving California Governor Gavin Newsom — or even, if it comes to that, Vice President Kamala Harris. As the establishment thinking goes, Newsom would be a more plausible and reputable alternative, once Kennedy has rendered Biden too weak to go on. In other words: Let RFK Jr. take all the risks, and do all the work, of removing from the scene a president due for retirement, so that Newsom can step in and triumphantly fill the void. Use Bobby to get rid of Joe, then use Gavin to get rid of Bobby.
Overlooked, in this talk of making RFK Jr. the stalking horse for a lightweight governor, are qualities apparent in the candidate himself. Where the enforcers of acceptable opinion see “danger” and “disinformation,” voters more likely will notice traits to admire. The heavy-handed treatment of Kennedy only draws attention to his independence and resiliency. The man has a toughness to him, and clearly labors under no illusion that he must please or impress the people who are trying to marginalize him.
The self-image of our major media as adjudicator of candidate merit, deciding who gets to move on and who doesn’t, is somehow unshakable, and the pundit class can be even more obtuse. When Al Hunt lays it down as written in the stars that Kennedy “has no chance to be the Democratic nominee,” who doesn’t hear the chorus of Republicans in 2015 and 2016 telling anyone who would listen that “Donald Trump will never be president”? It’s true that another visit by a black swan to American politics is hard to conceive, and that an RFK Jr. nomination would certainly present this creature again in full plumage. As always with our analysts and augurs of elections, it’s just their tone of wholly unwarranted self-assurance that grates.
In any event, drawn to the forbidden, and curious about the conspiracies, I spent a few days in 2020 with Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, a work that sold more than a million copies after publication that year even as it was found unfit for reviewing attention in the Times and elsewhere. And here is my layman’s diagnosis of this dangerous character: The source of Kennedy’s troubles is a chronic inability to tolerate the intellectual dishonesty he finds in his antagonists. He would fully recover, returning to the life of liberal accolades he once knew, if only he didn’t have so much integrity.
I have seldom read any book while feeling such respect for its author. There’s nothing flaky or offbeat about it. With courtroom standards of proof — everything cited and sourced to government databases and to peer-reviewed publications — Kennedy details egregious wrongdoing and raises entirely legitimate questions about the workings of the federal health bureaucracy during Covid and long before. He examines pharma and its dealings with government regulators; the compromising effects of some $10 billion a year in pharmaceutical advertising money on print and broadcast journalism, and of federal money on private medical research; and all the deceptions, exaggerations, and abuses of power by which the pandemic was exploited, with little regard for the interests, safety, concerns, or consent of the public.
What is really so “controversial” about any of this? An industry with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars is protected in law from liability for any ill effects of products that are mandated in law for public use. We’re supposed to be aghast at the suggestion that sound medical judgment might at times have given way to motives of self-enrichment at the expense of public health? Many television, print, and online outlets subsist on pharma-advertising revenue. That cannot possibly influence coverage? And in a country so heavily reliant on costly pharmaceuticals, why do we find so much persistent sickness, more than in European nations and even among children? I leave it all for others to argue, except to observe that such questions are plainly valid and necessary. The most scandalous feature of all here is the absolute prohibition on them. A less timid, herdlike generation of journalists would realize that books like Kennedy’s are exactly the kind of work that they themselves ought to be doing.
The constant disparagements that cling to RFK Jr. in news accounts — vaccine conspiracist, science-denying anti-vaxxer, and the like — are lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing about the merits of his arguments or about what has or has not actually been “debunked.” His critics just go on endlessly, idly parroting one another, lacking either the initiative or the probity to investigate and establish whether the characterizations are accurate and fair. Upton Sinclair, if he were around to publish some modern version of The Jungle, would be brushed off by our media as a peddler of “widely debunked anti-nutrition disinformation,” so self-satisfied and corporate-driven have many reporters become.
With all of the modern Left’s own many “woke” fixations, moreover, you wouldn’t think that RFK Jr.’s detractors are in any position to portray him as eccentric. And once we have figured out that he’s more normal and in touch with reality than they are, the next question is this: How did pandemic policies, and public-health and safety issues generally — involving, at times, complex matters of science that among rational people would permit disagreement — become grounds for vilifying and shunning one of the best-known and most capable public-interest lawyers of his generation? There must be more to it than that. What is Bobby Kennedy’s real offense? An epigram for one of his chapters in The Real Anthony Fauci, a quote from C. S. Lewis, offers a hint:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
There was a time when everything was fine for Bobby, because he confined his reformist zeal to the robber barons of disfavored, old-economy industries for which his party has no particular use. These were the toxic polluters he challenged as a litigator, in decades of protracted fights against chemical companies, pesticide makers, and some of the cruelest companies in animal agribusiness — fights that showed a lot of grit in RFK Jr., especially when we consider the softer career path of foundation positions, seats on corporate boards, serial awards galas for progressive heroes, etc., that would routinely flow to someone of his background. His troubles with fellow Democrats and with the media began when he turned his energies from the robber barons to other kinds of destructive enterprises and to other kinds of unpleasant, dictatorial people. Somehow, the most prominent member of America’s most iconic liberal Democratic family turned out to be a principled foe and expert critic of elitist sanctimony and of the arrogant, venal, and coercive impulses of the Left.
That’s how we come to find him now, as a presidential candidate, saying things such as “I don’t want the Democratic Party to be the party of fear and pharma and war and censorship.” “President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things that he didn’t do and he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country, was a lockdown.” “Ten centuries’ worth of wealth to pay for bailouts and lockdowns. We’re just printing money. And what happens to how is that paid off? Through inflation. And inflation is a tax on the poor.” “A lot of the ‘misinformation’ is just statements that depart from government orthodoxy. So, they have to either censor us or they have to lie about what’s true and what’s not true.” “It’s not racist or insensitive to say that we need to close our borders and have an orderly immigration policy.”
Or again: “The [climate] crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted — by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos — the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, . . . to stratify our society, with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls.”
On the war in Ukraine, Kennedy has argued in various interviews: “We’re there for the right reasons because we have tremendous compassion for the Ukrainian people and the illegal invasion, the brutality, and also their valor and their courage.” But now the Ukrainians are being used “as pawns in a proxy war between two great powers,” “to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.” “Every step that we’ve taken has been to enlarge the conflict and to maximize bloodshed,” destroying Ukraine while “driving the Russians closer to the Chinese, which is the worst thing for us.”
All of this, and more, makes RFK Jr. a unique and potent force, possibly upending much more than Joe Biden’s late-retirement plans. As Andrew Sullivan writes on Substack, Kennedy challenges “the Dems’ lockstep support for the ever-expanding, unwinnable and expensive war in Ukraine,” and he “sees clearly how the Dems have become the party of big corporations, HR authoritarians, and the mega-wealthy.” He brings to the contest “a deepening suspicion of corporate and government authority, a refreshing willingness to junk partisan orthodoxy, and, in an age of utter cowardice, what can only be called nerve.”
Kennedy 2024 certainly promises to reshuffle the deck for Democrats. He comes across in a way that many in the party, and not just the ’60s set, might well find appealing — along with who knows how many independents and crossover Republicans. He talks, usually, in a language that generations of Democrats, and especially Catholic Democrats, would have understood and that many today will doubtless welcome hearing again — about the dignity of work and of working communities, our duties to the weak and to our “poor brothers and sisters,” the simple, humane values of a free and just society.
And unlike the scolds and critics who’ve given him such grief, he is unafraid of challenge, from the Right or Left. He’s confident enough to speak to any interviewer or audience, and does so with learning, skill, and what Sullivan calls “an insane grasp of detail,” making actual arguments instead of just displaying attitude or assuming postures. You can watch RFK Jr. in hours of interviews, as I’ve done lately, and disagree on this, that, or the other point while, at least, never hearing evasions, clichéd thoughts, false notes or detecting the least airs of entitlement or self-regard. In general: a man who does his own thinking, and a pretty formidable fellow whom many voters will like whether they expect to or not — an impression that squares with my two or three encounters with him years ago. (Aiding another struggling cause, he provided a blurb for a book I wrote.)
His appeal to the hard Left is another matter. Let’s just say his candidacy will pose one of those pivotal tests for our democracy that liberal commentators are always talking about, only this time the test includes some surprise questions: Can the same voters who over the years have grown accustomed to an agenda of grievance-collecting, race conflict, and moral busybodying in the form of one crass new cause after another ever again respond to something better — to a reflective and uncalculating candidate who actually has serious and meaningful things to say? How many voters, in a party that has for so long fueled itself on fake outrage and fake empathy, can even tell anymore when a candidate’s message is real, at times compelling, and truly relevant to the shared concerns of their country? We will soon know.
Kennedys, after all, are reputed to be in the business of lifting our sights, and, if the reporters had been paying attention to RFK Jr.’s announcement speech, they’d have noticed he was trying to do just that. Even his acknowledgment of differences in the family had a nice, winsome touch his detractors could have learned from: They “just plain disagree with me,” he said. “And they are entitled to their beliefs and I respect their opinions on them and I love them back. And is it too much to hope that we could have the same thing for our country?” He might not overtake his party adversaries, but he’s already outclassing them.
Reading a transcript of that speech, apparently extemporized, you begin to wonder whether the party leaders trying to brush off Kennedy have really thought this thing through. Maybe they’re just looking at it from the wrong angle. His remarks were wonderful in places, and in ways that could have electoral force for all kinds of voters. A tighter, more selective version of the speech would give him something that no other candidate in any party could hope to outshine, before any audience in any primary state. In the most stirring parts, the words are 2024 but the vibe is 1968 — aspirational, patriotic, gentle, courageous of heart. Consider a stretch describing the scenes after his father’s requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as the funeral train slowly returned to Washington for the burial at Arlington — recalling, as you read this, that here’s the man his party wants gone because he supposedly has nothing of value to offer:
And I will never forget as a 14-year-old boy what I saw from the windows of the train that day and all of the urban train stations in Trenton and Newark and Philadelphia and Baltimore. They were crowded with black and white men singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In the countryside there were white people in military uniforms, there were blacks, there were rabbis, and priests. I remember in Delaware there were seven nuns standing at the back of a yellow pickup truck just waving handkerchiefs at us. We saw — I remember passing a Little League game where all of the kids on both sides, both teams, the coaches, all the spectators in the stands were standing with their hands on their hearts at salute. We saw a Boy Scout troop saluting military officers and personnel, hippies in tie-dyed t-shirts, people holding up babies, mothers holding up babies. Many of them had American flags and had the signs that said “Goodbye, Bobby” or “Pray for us, Bobby.” . . .
And it occurred to me, and it has struck me many times since, that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side, and that the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our anger and our bigotry and hatred . . . and all the lower angels, the darker angels of our character.
Familiar, maybe, but after a few years now of insubstantial and hackneyed presidential sermons on the “soul of America,” it’s nice to hear something with real life and feeling to it — with sincerity and unforced eloquence.
Then, too, for establishment Democrats, there’s something else they might want to ponder: the scene of how their convention 15 months from now might unfold, if the underdog astonishes everyone to somehow go all the way; the reaction at the United Center and far beyond at the sight of this new standard-bearer stepping forward as the nominee, a reconfigured and better party falling in behind him. Although in the way of old loyalties I’m still a Nixon-Agnew man myself, I have to confess that the prospect of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. going on to Chicago, and winning there, would be a truly great moment, beautiful and powerful, and a moment good for America.
Picture it for yourself, from the standpoint of a Democrat: the son carrying forward the ideals of the father, finishing the work that was cut short, faithful to the dream that never dies. A crowd electrified, men and women everywhere tearful and inspired, an entire nation captivated. Now think of Joe, Kamala, or Gavin trying to match that.