The most powerful name in politics
He's an authoritarian conspiracy maniac...but he's a Kennedy.
Me: “I can’t believe it’s going to be Trump vs. Biden again in 2024. I wish someone would come along to shake things up and give us something different.”
[monkey’s paw curls]
“That’s a Fox News poll,” I hear you respond. Their polling arm has actually been one of the few actually legit parts of the Fox News operation, but after it told viewers what they didn’t want to hear in 2020, I’m open to suggestions they’ve gutted it and are engaged in an “Operation Chaos” strategy to make Biden’s re-election campaign look more competitive than it really is.
But it’s not just Fox showing the nepotism-baby anti-vaxxer crank in double digits among Democrats:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches his unlikely bid for the Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday with the support of 14% of voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020, an exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds.
That is surprising strength for a candidate who has a famous political name but is now known mostly as the champion of a debunked conspiracy theory blaming childhood vaccines for autism.
In the survey taken Saturday through Tuesday, only 67% of Biden's 2020 supporters said they would support him for the Democratic nomination over his current challengers. Kennedy stands at 14%, and self-help author Marianne Williamson, a quixotic candidate for the nomination last time, is at 5%. Another 13% are undecided.
The vaccines/autism thing is just the tip of the conspiracy iceberg for RFK, Jr., a man who has also promoted 2004 election trooferism, JFK assassination trooferism, wind-turbines-when-theyre-visible-from-my-house trooferism, and - of course - COVID trooferism. That he hasn't yet blamed vaccines for the death of his father betrays some surprising restraint on his part.
There's a part of me that feels a slight twinge of nostalgia now that RFK Jr. is back in the news. Believe it or not, there was a time when the Democratic Party had its own vibrant conspiracy wing that wanted you to watch the latest edit of Loose Change and insisted that Diebold won Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004. (If you read “Diebold” and knew what I was talking about: welcome, fellow oldster.)
Oh, conspiracy theories about the actual parentage of Sarah Palin’s youngest child used to be a thing, too.
So why is Kennedy doing so well - or, at least, not too terribly - in the early polling? Part of it is probably “soft” Biden supporters who aren’t too keen on the old guy and think he’s too moderate, but they’ll likely come around when he inevitably wins the nomination.
Another big part of it? Almost certainly the name. Anyone named “Kennedy” from Massachusetts, who can show at least some blood ties to Camelot, will get some Democrats kicking the tires if nothing else.
The Kennedy family has produced some great politicians, a few real shitheels (you’re all thinking of the same one, aren’t you) and many, many mediocrities. That last name doesn’t guarantee victory, but it at least opens quite a few doors.
It’s kind of ironic that the United States of America, a country which came into being after revolting against an unelected hereditary monarchy, wound up creating so many domestic royal families in its place.
In the extremely unlikely event RFK2.0 does become President of the United States, well…it might be a good time to invest in private prison companies and guillotine manufacturers, because Kennedy basically wants to jail everyone who doesn’t share his politics.
Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) "should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals" and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are "contemptible human beings" of whom he "wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under"…
[…]
After this lock-'em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as "a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society"), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual "climate-deniers," but stressing that "corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty."
How would one pull off such a thoroughgoing trample of the First Amendment? Through the bold and vigorous exertions of government law enforcement. State attorneys general who have "particularly potent glands" and "the will, resolve and viscera to stand to up to the dangerous and duplicitous corporate propagandists," Kennedy wrote in a piece headlined "Jailing Climate Deniers," could "annul the charters of each of these mercenary merchants of deceit" and then "withdraw state operating authority from the soulless, nationless oil companies that have sponsored 'Big Lie' campaigns and force them to sell their in-state assets."
He then helpfully provided a kill list: Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute, of course, plus
the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Cooler Heads Coalition, Global Climate Coalition, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C. Marshall Institute, State Policy Network, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
"These front groups," he charged, "are snake pits for sociopaths." (Kennedy's denunciations of his political adversaries, then, now, and a quarter century ago, have been nothing if not florid.)
Alas, this episode was not some momentary anti-speech glitch in RFK Jr.'s otherwise civil libertarian matrix. At Al Gore's 2007 Live Earth rally in New Jersey, he urged the audience to "get rid of all of these rotten politicians that we have in Washington D.C. —who are nothing more than corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company, these villainous companies that consistently put their private financial interest ahead of American interest and ahead of the interest of all of humanity. This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors."
Treason in the United States is punishable by death. In his 2014 interview, Kennedy wished such a prosecution on the Kochs: "Do I think the Koch Brothers are treasonous? Yes, I do." At least when it came to notorious coal executive Don Blankenship in 2009, RFK Jr. limited his preferred sentencing to "jail…for all of eternity."
The political realignment in recent years, with Kennedy now lining up with some of the very people he once wanted Gulaged, has been kind of remarkable to behold.
And I do mean remarkable.
So, is Kennedy going to mount the kind of insurgent challenge to the Democratic Party establishment that his collaborator did to the GOP in 2016?
Being famous because you’re a Kennedy isn’t on the same level as being famous because you were a tabloid staple and reality-show star since most of us were in elementary school. And I’d like to think a much smaller percentage of the Democratic Party base isn’t as conspiracist, authoritarian and resentful as their opposite numbers in the Republican Party.
But that percentage isn’t zero. Ten minutes on social media will tell you as much.
The past decade has taught me that nothing is completely impossible, but Kennedy’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination are not much better than Boban Marjanovic’s chances of becoming MVP of the National Basketball Association.
The issue isn’t Kennedy having a shot at winning, so much as Kennedy doing just well enough to become unignorable. Kind of like Pat Buchanan in 1992, who was never going to take out the last one-term President, but made enough noise that Bush, Sr. had to cover his right flank. Which left an opening for the “New Democrat” from Arkansas.
(Also, the 1991-92 recession, of course. Thankfully there’s little chance of Biden being weakened by a recession in 2023-24 oh you have got to be kidding me)
Biden won’t be adding war crimes trials for Pfizer executives to the 2024 Democratic Party platform, but if the conspiracy wing makes a decent showing, he’ll have to give them a few rhetorical nods. At which point, some swing voters thoroughly turned off by Trump’s GOP will start asking if the alternative is any better.
It almost certainly will be. But I’d prefer it if at least one of the major parties could tramp down this nonsense before it can do any real damage.
Loved the Diebold crack. :-D