Robert F. Kennedy Jr. begins his campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination with 14 percent in a survey of Democratic primary voters conducted by USA TODAY/Suffolk University. That’s a decent, or even impressive starting point for a longshot running against an incumbent president. Kennedy won’t win the nomination, but he may well embarrass President Biden.
I wondered if that figure represented elderly Democrats who just reflexively preferred anyone named “Kennedy,” but USA Today writes, “the challenger’s appeal was strongest among self-identified conservatives, younger voters and those who don’t have a college degree.”
Some conservatives might cheer on Kennedy for his capacity to embarrass the incumbent president and his campaign team, or perhaps, as MBD observes, they concur with Kennedy’s full-throated, full-spectrum indictment of the American establishment: He is running “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new corporate feudalism on our country, to commoditize our children, our purple mountains’ majesty, to poison our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs, to strip-mine our assets, to hollow out the middle class, and keep us in a constant state of war.”
Count me out of any overt or covert enthusiasm for Kennedy’s bid, even if the impending quarterback of the New York Jets is apparently a Kennedy fan.
Last year, Kennedy said during a speech, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did… the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.” Kennedy later apologized.
Anyone who is going around arguing that today’s Americans have it rougher than Anne Frank needs his head examined.
A country where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets a significant portion of the Democratic vote is a country that increasingly concurs with Kennedy that pharmaceutical companies created a “holocaust” of autism in American children through vaccinations, that the Covid-19 vaccination effort was part of a plan to “make you a slave,” that 5G high speed transmission towers are being installed across the nation “to harvest our data and control our behavior,” and that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and American politics has way more than enough crazy people, statements, and behavior as is. This country’s paranoid schizophrenics are in bad enough shape; they don’t need another presidential candidate running around the country telling them that Cigarette-Smoking Man, the Illuminati and Bigfoot are all teaming up to work against them. Do you want more unhinged paranoid political enthusiasts sending pipe bombs in the mail?
Is it conceivable that some aspect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign redounds to the benefit of Republicans? Sure. But for that to happen, Kennedy’s bid has to matter, and for Kennedy’s bid to matter, more Americans have to buy into his nonsense conspiracy theories. That leaves the country as a whole in worse shape, no matter who benefits politically in the short-term.