On the menu today: In an interview yesterday, Ron DeSantis said of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “If you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” This is not the reset, reboot, or rejiggering that the DeSantis campaign needed, and it further illuminates the oddity that RFK Jr. is running for the Democratic nomination. But it’s the big-name Republicans who keep singing his praises, while most Democratic primary voters want nothing to do with him. Whatever RFK Jr.’s level of popularity, it is likely a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic and of the number of Americans who not only feel suspicious about America’s health authorities but are also looking for answers about why their health or the health of their loved ones is not what they want it to be. Also, I explain what this “on the menu today” section is supposed to do.
Ask Your Doctor if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Right for You
Former president Donald Trump, discussing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a radio interview in late June: “He’s been very nice to me, I’ve actually had a very nice relationship with him over the years. He’s a very smart guy, and a good guy. He’s a commonsense guy, and so am I. So, whether you’re conservative or liberal, common sense is common sense. A lot of what I run on is common sense. He’s doing really well, I saw a poll, he’s at 22. That’s pretty good! That’s pretty good, doing very well.”
In an interview with Fox News in July, Trump added, “He’s a very smart person. I know a lot of the members of that family, and he’s a very smart guy. And he’s hit a little bit of a nerve. And a lot of Democrats I know want to vote for him.”
Ron DeSantis, discussing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an interview with Clay Travis on OutKick the Coverage yesterday:
Travis: If Trump picked RFK Jr. as a potential vice-presidential candidate — crazy idea? If you were president, if you were the nominee, would you consider RFK Jr. as a running mate, or—
DeSantis: Here’s the issue. Like, I’m aligned with him on Fauci and the corruption in the health bureaucracies 100 percent. And I think he’s also said some other thing that I agree with, too. But at the end of the day, he’s more liberal, very liberal on some [issues]. He used to say, I don’t know if he still believes this, that if you deny climate change, you should go to jail. Things like that. So it’s like, conservative voters, you know, they would want those positions flushed out. He opposed the affirmative-action ruling, to say you can’t racially discriminate, on that he would have wanted that to remain. So, I just think that at the end of the day, you need somebody that is going to reflect the values of the broad coalition. Yes, the medical stuff, I’m very good on that. So that does appeal to me. But there’s a whole host of other things that he’d probably be out of step with. And so on that regard, it’s like, okay, if you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC. But in terms of being veep, there’s 70 percent of the issues he may be adverse to our base on. That just creates an issue.
(Before we go any further, where else have you seen a full transcript of DeSantis’s remarks on this subject? Other than in this newsletter, I see it in Jeff Blehar’s piece. Before you complain that some columnist is being unfair, keep track of which writers make the effort to give you the complete answer from DeSantis for full and proper context.)
There’s a lot to object to in there, but I will salute DeSantis for using the appropriate metaphor, “flushed out,” when describing many of RFK Jr.’s political views.
If Ron DeSantis wants to reboot his campaign, publicly flirting with the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s serving in some health-focused role in his administration is not a step in the right direction. Noah Rothman is correct: DeSantis is rapidly alienating the voters most open to considering him as a Trump alternative by relentlessly chasing and courting the voters most loyal to Trump.
RFK Jr.’s worldview is a shambolic collection of tasteless Holocaust metaphors, sinister conspiracies contending that vaccines and 5G high-speed-transmission towers are tools for subjugating the population, and authoritarian impulses. He now says that he opposes gun control, but, in 2018, he stated, “Parkland students are right; the NRA is a terror group.” He wanted to ban ExxonMobil from operating in New York State because he contended that it misled the public about climate change. He has called for the Koch brothers to be tried at The Hague as war criminals, and DeSantis’s memory is correct: Kennedy said he wished there was a law that would allow him to punish climate-change skepticism. He argued that state attorneys general should revoke the charters of the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute because they were “oil-industry surrogates.” He now wishes for voters to see him as a defender of the First Amendment.
Keep in mind, my thought that RFK Jr. would be better off running as an independent was allegedly outlandish, even though the two leading Republican candidates keep saying how swell he is and polling indicates a majority of Democrats can’t stand him. When New Hampshire Democrats were asked to describe Kennedy with one word, the most common responses were “crazy,” “dangerous,” “insane,” “conspiracy,” and “unknown.” In the last Quinnipiac survey, 48 percent of Republicans said they were favorable toward RFK Jr., while just 21 percent of Democrats said the same.
We can debate whether RFK Jr. is genuinely popular or whether he just seems that way because he generates a lot of news coverage by being controversial. Here is his support according to the last seven national polls of the Democratic primary: 16 percent, 7 percent, 15 percent, 14 percent, 16 percent, 17 percent, 15 percent. In New Hampshire, Kennedy is at 10 percent, 11 percent, and 9 percent in the last three polls. One poll in California had him at 17 percent. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks for, and appeals to, a distinct, loud, and not particularly large minority.
(There is this asinine theory floating around on social media that National Review is somehow insufficiently opposed to RFK Jr.’s nuttiness, apparently based upon Charlie Cooke’s being polite and not furiously denouncing him while appearing shortly after him on Megyn Kelly’s program — never mind all the times Charlie has accurately labeled Kennedy a “kook” on the Editors podcast. Or that Charlie accurately labeled RFK Jr. an “aspiring tyrant” back in 2014. NR also published a Matt Scully piece singing RFK Jr.’s praises, one that I and many others deemed to be way too generous and bending over backwards to avoid scrutiny of RFK’s more outlandish and authoritarian positions. But we’re the kind of magazine and website that publishes a variety of views, including several pieces that effectively responded, “No, Scully, RFK Jr. really is a nutjob.”)
Whatever his level of popularity, it is unlikely that Kennedy would be as popular as he is today were it not for the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting controversy over the vaccines, and in particular the vaccine mandates. This generated a whole lot of suspicion of the government and of pharmaceutical companies. The people who run pharmaceutical companies are not saints. Sometimes they admit to price-fixing. Sometimes they pay physicians to recommend their products and target elderly consumers who are easily confused. There is no denying that there was widespread pressure to get the Covid vaccines into people’s arms as quickly as possible, and most people know that the usual vaccine-approval process is slow-moving and deliberate, taking several years. Americans are understandably wary when the federal government’s position shifts from recommending vaccines to requiring them. And public officials, including President Biden, kept exaggerating the effectiveness of the vaccines, claiming that, once you’re vaccinated, “you do not spread the disease to anyone else.”
Some studies did show that vaccinated people were less likely to transmit the virus, probably because their bodies fought off the infection quicker and “shed” less of the virus during the infection. But it was not accurate to say, as Biden said or implied on multiple occasions, that once vaccinated, you could no longer spread the virus. Biden is an old man who was never particularly careful when speaking off the cuff, but the president’s exaggerating the effectiveness of the vaccine probably added to some people’s suspicions that they weren’t being told the whole story.
Beyond that, I suspect that the people who believe in conspiracies surrounding modern medicine are a bit different from those who believe in UFOs or chase Bigfoot or hunt for ghosts.
Life is unfair. Sometimes cancer or some other dread disease strikes out of the blue. While we know some factors that can cause life-threatening diseases — smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, lots of time in the sun increases the risk of skin cancer — we don’t really know precisely what makes cancer appear one day. Some people who smoked a lot or frequently sunbathed will escape the dreaded big “C,” while others who rarely partook of those activities will find themselves facing that terrifying diagnosis.
A lot of people are not in the physical condition they want or wish to be in, whether out of cruel random chance or entirely mundane or self-inflicted reasons — bad eating and exercise habits, drinking, past or ongoing drug use, etc. Almost everyone prefers to see oneself as a good person, so everyone faces that haunting question that Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote about — why bad things happen to good people. Why do good people suffer terrible ailments? Why do certain bad people appear to live their entire lives free of any serious affliction?
Parents ask, “Why is my child autistic?”
The conspiracy theorists offer the reassurance of an answer, even if it isn’t an accurate one. The conspiracy theorists offer stories of greedy pharmaceutical companies and doctors who are covering up evidence that their medications hurt people, or stories about “cures they don’t want you to know about.” The cellphones are causing brain cancer, the FDA is hiding natural cures, the CIA spreads HIV, genetically modified foods are meant to reduce population, and so on. These stories give those suffering from some ailment or facing a great health challenge a villain to blame and a vision of hope.
Note that more than 100 million Americans, about a third of the country, do not have a general practitioner that they visit for regular checkups. If you regularly talk to a doctor and feel like your doctor knows how to treat your ailments, you are more likely to trust that doctor. If you trust your doctor, you are less likely to believe that your doctor is part of some vast and sinister conspiracy to make you sick or control you. How many RFK Jr. fans have had a bad experience with a doctor? How many don’t have a doctor that they trust?
To paraphrase those ubiquitous drug commercials, “Ask your doctor if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right for you.”
ADDENDUM: Some commenter recently complained that the “on the menu” paragraph at the top of this newsletter repeated information that is mentioned later in the newsletter and attributed it to poor editing or a lack of editing. No, pal, the “on the menu” section aims to give you an appetizer, a one-paragraph taste of what the day’s newsletter is covering. Maybe you like what it’s going to be about, maybe you don’t. But ideally, you immediately get a sense of what you’ll be reading about for the next few minutes.
I suppose I could go with the
- bullet points
- and ALL CAPS
- and bold font
- and random italics
of that other morning newsletter that’s practicing “smart brevity” or “strategic incoherent terseness” or whatever the slogan is. But that’s how this newsletter works — one-paragraph summary at the top, the meat and fun stuff beneath that, and stray scattered thoughts in the addenda (when there’s more than one) or addendum (when there’s just one).
The fact that you don’t get it doesn’t mean I did it wrong!