Before I get into the meat of this discussion, let me make one thing very clear. If I had lost both my father and my uncle to gun violence and my cousin disappeared in a private plane wreck, I don’t think I’d necessarily be of sound mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that RFK Jr., is loony tunes, but I’m not sure that what he necessarily says comes out of a brain which is always functioning in a normal manner or proper way.
Be that as it may, I still think his decision to mount a 3rd-party run for the Presidency is based primarily on an assumption that if he can pick up a modicum of votes in blue states, that maybe he could become the Democrat(ic) standard bearer in 2028.
In the meantime, because the outcome of this year’s Presidential contest could ultimately turn on a very thin margin in just a couple of states, getting his name on the ballot could mean that someone who isn’t the choice of either of the major political parties could determine who ends up sitting behind the real Resolute desk for the next four years.
Which brings me to the first question about RFK Jr.’s campaign, which is this: Why is he running at all? He claims that he is running because a) he can win, and b) he’s not happy with the direction of the country today. I get this from an interview he gave to CNN last year when early polls gave him 20% of the Democratic vote against Joe.
The most recent poll from Quinnipiac, whose polls I really trust, has Biden with 38%, Trump with 37% and Kennedy with 15%. Since in a two-way race Biden is at 49% and Trump at 45%, Kennedy is pulling voters away from both sides, although he hurts Joe more than he hurts Trump.
In 1996, Ross Perot got 9% of the popular vote but didn’t carry a single state. In 2000, Ralph Nader got less than 3% of the popular vote, but if he hadn’t been on the ballot, Al Gore would certainly have picked up the 547 Florida votes he needed to beat out George Bush and succeed Bill Clinton to the top post.
So, when RFK Jr. says he’s in this year’s race not to be a ‘spoiler,’ but to win the whole thing, he knows he’s not telling the truth, and it’s allegedly his desire to inject truth into the political arena which motivats him to piss away some of the family money on his campaign in the first place.
And when your family picks up $625 million for selling Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, you have plenty of money to fritter away on a political campaign.
So, to try and figure out what’s really inside RFK’s political head, I went to his Presidential website and looked through a veery detailed page containing all his ‘policies.’ And most of what he says he will do is a warmed-over version of the Sanders approach, with some additional concerns about the Indians, the veterans, and a couple of other bad-off groups.
Meanwhile, the website doesn’t contain one, fucking mention of the only issue which gets him any media attention at all, which is his opposition to vaccines, particularly any attempt by governmental authorities to mandate public health strategies to keep us from dying or just getting sick.
I understand why certain populations like black Americans might be skeptical of government programs to protect the general population from disease. I mean, how would you feel if individuals like yourself had been used as human guinea pigs in a series of undisclosed medical experiments lasting nearly 30 years? The so-called Tuskegee Experiment was our version of what Dr. Mengele did in Nazi concentration camp before and during World War II, but we showed our innate compassion by paying out some $10 million to the surviving participants od\f that study in 1974. Big, goddamn deal.
Meanwhile, RFK Jr. continues to shlep around talking about the dangers of mandated immunization programs, but he now claims he’s not ‘anti-vaccine,’ he’s just concerned about ‘vaccine safety.’
Know what? RFK Jr. can take his family name, the horse he rode in on and the whole cavalry behind him and to quote Grandpa: ‘chob en drerd’ (read: stick it up his you-know-what.)
It’s bad enough we have to listen to Donald Trump’s bullshit every day. We also don’t need to be subjected to the misinformation that Kennedy’s family money can buy.
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