‘The last time an American president faced a serious primary challenge, the Soviet Union still existed, Roseanne was the No. 1 sitcom in the country, and Mark Zuckerberg was seven years old.’
— Peter Savodnik in The Free Press
There is a general consensus that Joe Biden Jr. will be the Democratic nominee for a second term as U.S. president, but there are legitimate concerns over his age — he would be the oldest-ever person to hold the office. His approval rating, if polls can be trusted, was 40.7 percent on June 2. That’s better than the 37.7 percent he had last July, but with a 54.9 disapproval rate, it is not a rosy picture for the president. Add to that the growing evidence of influence-peddling to the financial benefit of family members and election to a second term is far from certain.
Biden won in 2020 due to a terrible alternative choice — allowing Donald Trump to remain in office for a second term. There is little doubt that Americans voted not for Joe Biden but against Donald Trump.
It may come down to a choice between Biden and Trump in 2024, but some people are hoping for a better choice, and they may find it in Robert Kennedy Jr., despite his reputation as being “out there” on issues such as vaccines.
Not that Kennedy is the anti-vaxxer that people make him out to be. “I’m not anti-vaccine,” he said. “I’m against any medicine that’s improperly tested.” The COVID-19 vaccines were rushed through the approval process and the side effects were downplayed to the extent that anyone mentioning them was sidelines as someone spreading “misinformation” — which really means inconvenient truths. The vaccine has proven to be highly effective in reducing the effects of the disease, if not protecting people from the disease itself, but there have been side effects, just as any other vaccine or medication can have side effects. Had people been fully informed of those possible side effects, the majority of Americans still would have chosen the shots over the possibility of death, but those with health conditions that made the risks greater could have chosen to avoided the shots.
Peter Savodnik presented an honest look at Kennedy and the other announced candidate for the Democratic nomination, Marianne Williamson, in a piece for The Free Press. “To be clear,” he wrote, “Kennedy will probably lose big. He lacks money and voters, and it’s unclear which, if any, major Democratic constituencies or donors — unions, trial lawyers, public school teachers, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg — would back him.”
Still, it’s intriguing to have someone so marginalized by the mainstream press and social media, due to his willingness to question the party line, drawing (sometimes secret) support from Democrats, Independents, and even Republicans. “He’d easily beat Trump,” said one anonymous supporter.
Kennedy told his interviewer, “There are people who are angry, and they deserve to be angry, and either Trump is going to sign them up — Donald Trump — for a ride into the darkness, or we can try to capture that energy and turn it into something positive for our country, something that is reflective of the highest ideals of the American experience.”
Williamson, too, sees an opening in the next election. “We thought it was critically important to defeat Trump in 2020, and of course, it was. But there was also a naive belief that, if we just did that, the country might go back to normal. Clearly, the problem was bigger than one man. There’s a hatred, a neo-authoritarianism that had already metastasized. I’m convinced that a transactional politics alone, one that fails to address the underlying dynamics of what’s happening in this country, will not be enough to win in 2024.”
Biden has excelled at transactional politics, getting bipartisan support for many of his initiatives, and those initiatives have led to a strong economy, continuing increases in employment, a new emphasis on American manufacturing, and people rising out of poverty.
Where he has fallen short is in reigning in the military-industrial-technology complex, as Kennedy notes. Just as Barack Obama increased the use of drones to make it easy to seek out and kill the enemy while creating a lot of collateral damage to innocent civilians, Biden has increased government’s role in regulating free speech and controlling the flow of information.
Saying he likes Joe Biden, Kennedy observed, “I see him doing things that I know, at his core, he cannot possibly believe in — the censorship that’s coming out of the White House, it’s so contrary to everything that he’s stood for over his life.”
A decade ago, liberals and members of the media opposed corporate greed and questioned the government, and Kennedy still holds those views. “If you’re a media platform, you know, you should be questioning the government,” Kennedy said, but now, “Instead of speaking truth to power, they’re broadcasting propaganda to the powerless.”
Kennedy recalled how his father, Robert Francis Kennedy, “on the last day of his life, won the most rural state in our country and the most urban state — he won South Dakota and California at the same time — and so he succeeded in kind of bridging the gap between Americans who were divided.”
Yet that day, June 5, 1968 — 55 years ago today — Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, who died the next day at age 43. The assassin said it was Kennedy’s support of Israel over the Palestinians that made him act. RFK Jr. thinks the CIA may have been responsible for his father’s death and that the CIA definitely killed his uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (Sirhan was most recently denied parole on March 1, 2023, and will not be eligible for another parole hearing until 2026.)
Kennedy, like Trump and Bernie Sanders, embodies populism. Americans were ready for a change in 2016 and, had the Democratic Party not conspired with the media to knock the popular Vermont senator out of the race and instead make Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee, there is a good chance that Trump would never have been elected in the first place. The face-off between Trump and the smug Clinton, who labeled half of America “deplorable”, put a narcissist in the White House.
“Populism is easy to hijack,” Kennedy said. “Demagogues can easily hijack it by exploiting humanity’s negative, universal impulses: greed, anger, hatred, bigotry, self-pity, xenophobia, misogyny. But also, you know, a lot of populist movements are idealistic in their core. My father was a populist, but he was appealing to something better, those parts of ourselves that say we have to step outside of our narrow self-interest and see ourselves as part of a community and resist this seduction of the notion that we can advance ourselves as a people by leaving our poorer brothers and sisters behind.”
Williamson, who has an even smaller chance of becoming the Democratic nominee, said, “The Democratic leadership establishment hijacked the party…. Democratic politics today is a politics that says, ‘I will try to help you survive within an unjust system.’ What I’m saying is the Democratic Party should end the unjust system.”
Williamson is polling at one percent, while Kennedy is polling at 20 percent support. That is not likely to change enough between now and election day to defeat Biden, but voters should keep in mind that, if Trump is the Republican nominee, the polls are divided over who would win. Polls are notoriously unreliable, but with Biden’s age being a factor, Democrats may want to back a different horse in this race.
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RFK Jr. Even his family isn’t supporting him. It’s not just about Covid vaccines. He is anti-vaccine for most common childhood diseases. He spreads disinformation. However, there is a really nice write up by Town and Country, What is RFK JR Fighting For?
Published 9/9/2021. It covers from his birth to 2021.
Not so sure about the Biden allegations.
Not sure about censorship either. If you lived here in Florida , you would know censorship.
Good write up.