Bobby Jr. and the politics of crazy
Until recently, the last time a member of the vaunted Kennedy family was in presidential campaign mode was on the evening of Aug. 12, 1980, in New York City. The occasion was that year’s Democratic convention.
It was Jimmy Carter’s convention (sort of) but Ted Kennedy’s night. The senator from Massachusetts was ending a roller-coaster campaign against an incumbent president. Twenty years earlier, his brother John F. Kennedy had captured both the nomination and the White House. In 1968, another brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was killed while trying for the nomination.
It’s not easy, indeed it’s nearly impossible, to beat a White House incumbent of your own party. Teddy found that out the hard way. At the podium at Madison Square Garden, he was bowing out as a defeated candidate but with a rhetorical flourish that remains thrilling these many decades later.
Basking in the glow of a crowd that loved his two assassinated brothers and, by extension, him, Kennedy gave the speech of his life. He ended it this way: “For all of those whose cares have become our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream will never die.”
Now, 42 years later, comes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bobby’s 69-year-old son and Jack and Ted’s nephew. He too is running against a president of his own party. He is a very different political animal than his family predecessors. He’s a bit of a “kook,” according to one critic. He’s toxic and dangerous to the health of American democracy, according to a more acid-tongued appraiser.
As of this week, Bobby Jr., who has never held public office, is polling 20% among the Democratic faithful. As Jim Newell of Slate explained, “Kooks have followings too.”
A majority of political pundits, it appears, say this high, early number has everything to do with Bobby’s last name. It’s a tribute to JFK and RFK that they continue to cast such long shadows. This year marks the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder. It will soon be 55 years since Bob Kennedy was gunned down.
Others are not so quick to draw this singular conclusion. Some point to the doubts many Democrats harbor when they contemplate nominating 80-year-old Joe Biden for another four years in the White House. Eighty-two on January 20, 2025, Joe Biden will be 86 at the end of a second term. Can he survive and, if so, in what shape?
In consequence, this line of reasoning goes, support for Kennedy is a cry out for someone else – someone younger, someone not so halting in speech and gait, someone who may be longer for this world.
Other critics point to the segment of Bobby’s policy prescriptions that echo those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; specifically, his long-held view that corporate America and the very rich are strangling the life out of middle America and ruining the environment to boot. (Kennedy’s legal career has largely focused on pressing environmental spoilage cases.)
Still other critics have a darker explanation: Even Democrats, thought to be sane, are susceptible to the sort of crazy thinking that has made Republicans dangerous to themselves and to the country: vaccines not only don’t work but actually kill and cripple; disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci is a predatory liar and cheat; the federal government is coming after you – it wants to take away your freedoms.
Bobby Jr. once compared such COVID restrictions as face masks to Nazi atrocities, only the restrictions were worst. He said, “Even in Nazi Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland [and] you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank.”
Kennedy calls Fauci “the most despotic doctor in human history.” (Hello, Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Mengele.) The title of his most recent bestseller is “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
JFK, according to his close aid, Ted Sorensen, was extreme only against extremism. In 1962, the president said “the great enemy of the truth” are “myths” in so far as they are “persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
For all of this, Bobby doesn’t concede even an inch of “daylight” between himself and his uncles and father, as he told UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers last week.
Something lurks deep and mysterious in Bobby Kennedy Jr. There is rational Bobby, as when he told Sayers, “There is a [populist] rebellion happening in our country and if we don’t capture that rebellion for the forces of idealism and … generosity, somebody is going to hijack the rebellion for darker purposes.”
Then there’s irrational Bobby. It’s that Bobby that Democrats need to worry about.
Richard Robbins is the author of “JFK Rising: The 1960 West Virginia Primary and the Emergence of John F. Kennedy.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.