What a country we live in: Elon Musk’s Space X rocket booster blows up and it’s called a “success,” Don Lemon is fired from CNN for saying about Nikki Haley what she said about Joe Biden (and you want to know why CNN is a distant third), Tucker Carlson taking the fall for Fox News’ defamation defeat while Maria Bartiromo still has a job, despite being the worst enabler of false election fraud conspiracies at the network, and another kid shot by an paranoid gunslinger. Who is going to save us from ourselves?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
Some of us remember when Sen. Ted Kennedy decided to challenge Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination. Some were doubtful, since the Chappaquiddick incident was not forgotten and would for some time leave a question mark in people’s minds. One current “theory” about what happened was that Kennedy became aware of the presence of a police car and didn’t want to be caught in a drunk driving incident with a woman not his wife, and got out of the car and walked the rest of the way home, telling Mary Jo Kopechne to drive back on her own; but being unfamiliar with the narrow bridge and in an intoxicated state herself, she drove over the bridge into the water. When Kennedy realized she hadn’t arrived he went off looking for her and found the car in the water, and by that time she was long deceased.
But Kennedy knew this was his “best” shot at the presidency, because Carter was highly unpopular at that point, and his “malaise in America" speech was not what people wanted to hear. Carter was under attack even from the left for having no plan to attack inflation or unemployment, instead focusing on yet another energy crisis, insisting on people suffering more by turning down their thermostats and supporting a national 55 mph speed-limit law. Then there was the Iran hostage crisis and the disastrous “rescue” attempt. Of course Kennedy was to the left of Carter, but maybe people wanted a government to be proactive, and not what Ronald Reagan was offering, which was just cutting everything and allowing businesses and the rich to run the country free of annoying regulations.
Kennedy ended-up only winning 12 states and 37 percent of the total primary vote, but he did pick up 1,151 delegates, which should have been seen as just how much trouble Carter was in. Although with a third party candidate in the mix Reagan won less than 51 percent of the popular vote; he took home 489 electoral votes, winning all but six states. Two months after his inauguration, John Hinkley tried to shorten his term in office, and was later found not guilty for (what else) “reasons of insanity.” But Reagan was soon back in the saddle to fulfill his promise of a new “morning in America,” even though for the next two years the country saw double-digit inflation and unemployment—as well as questions about Reagan’s mental state, which frankly was more questionable than Biden’s is today.
Anyways, with Biden's poll numbers underwater, a new Kennedy is on the horizon, and should we take him as seriously as he does himself? After all, it’s not like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a household name, and he has never held political office. After an arrest for heroin possession in 1983, in which he was sentenced to probation after entering a drug treatment program, he began a career as an environmental activist, as a lawyer representing various groups who filed lawsuits against polluters. Unfortunately, Kennedy is perhaps better known for his Covid-19 denialism, which quite frankly might give one pause, although Kennedy seems to think this will help him win votes among Republicans who might not like their choices in 2024.
A few weeks ago Kennedy tweeted "If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I'll jump in the race. If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms.” Well, it appears that the necessary criteria have been met (in his mind anyways), and he has made known his intention to oppose Biden for the Democratic nomination:
On Fox News the other day, he praised Carlson for “exposing” how “greedy Pharma” controlled news content which “promoted jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless.” This was the kind of misinformation that got Kennedy banned from Instagram (he also claimed that the vaccines caused autism in children). Kennedy also oddly accused Trump of being the instigator of lockdowns, which “wiped out the middle class in the country systematically.” Of course many people would say that the “wiping out” of the middle class was a process that began decades ago, with the gradual loss of manufacturing jobs and the lowering of marginal tax rates.
Yet Kennedy wasn’t afraid to be on the left of the kind of thing Fox News usually pushes: "There's a cushy socialism for the rich and this kind of brutal, merciless capitalism for the poor. It keeps us in a state of war… it bails out banks,” he said, adding that
Last month, the United States government told 30 million people it was cutting their food stamp checks by 90 percent. It took 15 million people off Medicare. The same month it gave $300 million to the Silicon Valley Bank and tapped up the cost of the Ukraine war to $113 billion. We're sending $113 billion to the Ukraine. The entire budget of EPA is $12 billion. The budget of CDC is $11 billion. We have 57% of American citizens could not put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency. A quarter of our citizens are hungry. So we're cutting welfare and food stamps by 90 percent.
Of course the comment in regard to Ukraine is playing to “populist” and “America First” sentiment, which could “appeal” either to the far-right or far-left; it is also predictably misleading. The U.S. has sent less than $80 billion in aid to Ukraine, two-thirds of that is in the form of military assistance. The EU and European countries on their own have spent much more than the U.S. in direct financial assistance.
Still, while we may conjecture that Kennedy’s other “figures” are incorrect or exaggerated, it should be noted with or without aid to Ukraine, the amount of money spent on social programs started at low base since the Clinton presidency, so Ukrainian aid shouldn’t be seen as the problem, because that aid isn’t going back into social programs anyways if Republican budget-cutters have any say in it.
Without an arm-twister in the White House (since begging didn't work), you can't expect people like Manchin and Sinema to help people on the federal level, so it is local governments who have to fill in the gaps of humanity, at least in "liberal" cities. Last night I encountered an old man who looked like he hadn't washed in a year, jabbering gibberish to an unseen companion. He wouldn't last long in a homeless shelter, so I thought that maybe I better mail in that ballot (given that today is the voting deadline) in support of the creation of mental health "crisis care centers."
Unfortunately the baggage that Kennedy carries also includes a habit of shooting his mouth off and making bizarre analogies, such as asserting that lockdowns were akin to, well, the way authoritarian regimes like the Nazis “controlled” the populace (actually, more like the Orwellian model). He has opposed Covid-19 vaccinations for children, in fact has asserted that the vaccines were concocted too quickly and there is no proof they are useful. Personally, I took my two shots and did not die (yet) from it, although it is my suspicion that it did not work against the Omicron variant.
Maybe some of this can be blamed on his childhood upbringing; in his book RFK Jr: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, Jerry Oppenheimer claims that his mother, Ethel, had lousy parenting skills and largely ignored her children. We are told that Kennedy found comfort in animals (which may have had a hand in his environmental advocacy), and drug use. The lack of parenting after the assassination of his father led Kennedy and his siblings to lead “rebellious” lives; Kennedy himself was kicked out of numerous boarding schools and ran with a “bad” crowd.
Still, he was smart enough to get a law degree and engage in his environmental passions. Years ago I listened to his radio show when “liberal” Seattle actually had a “progressive” talk radio station, and he didn’t seem any more “out there” than the other left-wing personalities. Nevertheless, his Covid pronouncements were an embarrassment for his relations, leading to distancing then and refusal to endorse him now, given the mortification it might cause them if given a more public hearing.
But to be fair about this, opinion polls seem to suggest that the return to “normalcy” under Biden only worked for as long as people needed to catch their breath after all the confusion caused by the Trump years, and now people are back to their old left-center-far-right mindsets. I always said that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump in 2016 because the electorate wanted “change” again, and since Sanders and Trump were different sides of the same coin, “populists” and working class whites (especially in the Midwest states) who were morally queasy about Trump would have preferred to vote for Sanders, and that would have been enough to overcome the loss of votes from, say, bitter gender activists who were for Hillary or no one.
It is certainly possible we could see a similar “preference” for the "populist" Kennedy over the fascism of Trump or DeSantis and their own habit of disturbing pronouncements, if it came to that. One thing that is for certain now is that it could be a little bit more interesting primary season next year if Kennedy is running.
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