By KELLY SLOAN | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
We have discovered, over these last few months, that even the surname “Kennedy” is no longer adequate insulation against the ire of the current Democratic Party. Stalwart party loyalists and an unsympathetic media never much cared for Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s quixotic attempt to unseat President Biden anyway, but his withdrawal from the race and subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump proved almost too much for some of the more hysteria-prone out there.
Lawrence O’Donnell, never one for sober analysis or circumspection, called RFK jr. “the Jeffery Dahmer of the animal kingdom” – presumably a reference to his propensity for dumping dead bears in Central Park and cutting up whale carcasses for ease of transport, an activity which has evidently stoked displeasure from environmental groups – and said the he has “horrified his family almost as much as Jeffery Dahmer horrified his family by endorsing the most horrifying Republican presidential nominee in history.” He went on, referring to the Sr. RFK, to talk about “the beatific glow of the name Robert Kennedy, a name which his son has now fully disgraced.” Oh my.
Even the generally far more circumspect – and far brighter – senior political editor for Politico, Charlie Mahtesian, couldn’t help but take a gratuitous dig at junior the day after his announcement, writing: “Some third-party presidential campaigns are noble endeavors driven by the loftiest of principles. Others are vanity projects, exercises in cynicism that leave our politics slightly more soiled for the experience. Today, we learned which camp Robert F. Kennedy Jr. belongs in.” Hint, it’s not the former.
Emotional outbursts aside, politically speaking RFK jr. was never much of a threat to become President of the United States. The question was always, For whom would he be the spoiler? The answer was never quite clear, as it generally has been for spoilers past; Ralph Nader obviously took from Democratic-leaning voters, for instance, and Ross Perot siphoned votes from George Bush sr.
It was never that self-evident with RFK jr. Conventional wisdom, at least early on, suggested that he would peel off votes from Biden – he was, after all, a lifelong Democrat, and, at least prior to his excommunication last week, a scion of the Kennedy clan. His policy positions – even the sane ones; and let’s face it, the guy holds a lot of, let’s just say, unique ideas – were reliably liberal, often more aligned with the far-left views of his uncle Ted than his father.
Even his signature position – antipathy to vaccination – was, lest we forget, originally predominantly the domain of the kookiest of the flower-child left, the Boulder and San Francisco types who eschewed the trappings of imperialist capitalism and consequently hated any business or industry that made money – like “Big Oil” or “Big Pharma”. Or as the rest of us called them, those industries which keep us warm and alive.
But as the appeal of economic populism began to creep into the Republican Party under Trump, he found in the GOP some fellow-travelers. His wackier anti-vaccine views now appealed not just to the anti-capitalist left, but to many on the right who were suspicious of the COVID-19 vaccine, or appalled by the vaccine-related mandates.
Then of course, RFK jr’s public disparagement of the Democratic Party grew as quickly as his estrangement from the Party whose royal family he was ostensibly a part of, catalyzed by his unforgivable sin of challenging the sitting President. This, naturally, endeared him to the Trump crowd. The enemy of my enemy…
Now, all of a sudden, it appeared as though an RFK jr. candidacy threatened to take from Trump voters as much, or even more, then from Biden voters. Which only diluted his impact, reducing the margins by which he would have influenced outcomes for either side.
Okay, so now he’s out, and has plighted his troth to Trump, how is that likely to play out? It’s still too early to tell precisely, of course. His endorsement of Trump suggests that his devotees will slide in that direction; but there’s not a great deal of them, and in any case they are presumably not an homogenous block and several may either elect to go for Harris, especially those who ideologically align with the Democrats but could not bear the thought of Biden for one reason or another, or simply say to hell with it and not vote for anyone.
That said, considering that the race is now essentially a 50/50 toss-up, those few votes in key swing states that do go to Trump could make all the difference.
So the Trump campaign can now count among its numbers both an eccentric leftist in Robert F. Kennedy jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, another ex-Democrat who has endeared herself to Republicans by saying some pretty good things about the direction of her former party, but who has also attacked that party from the left on economics and foreign policy. As the aphorism goes, politics makes for strange bedfellows. That’s fine, provided one takes care not to absorb the more preposterous of those bedfellow’s habits.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.