AGING DINOSAUR PUNDITS WANT A NEW TRUMP, AND SOME ARE HOPING IT'S ROBERT KENNEDY JR.

I didn't set out to do two consecutive posts about Robert Kennedy Jr., but it's starting worry me that a non-trivial number of past-their-prime but still fairly well-known pundits seem to want him to be the new politcal black swan -- a candidate who upends the expected course of the presidential race, the way Donald Trump did in 2016. I worry that this is a contagion that might spread, especially because the expected course of the race -- Trump and Joe Biden cruise to the nominations -- is just so boring. Political pundits want to avoid tedium at their jobs (they should try getting a real job sometime if they think what they're doing now is tedious), and as a result they don't care that Kennedy's anti-vaccine mania literally kills people. Let the peasants die! Just spare me ennui!

First, we have Peggy Noonan:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced last week, this week hit 19% support among Democratic voters. That’s a lot! Especially for a guy who’s been labeled a bit of a nut. (He has been a leader of the idea that childhood vaccines are connected to autism.) But his larger general message would appeal to the edges of left and right, and blends into the general populist mood: Corporations and the government are lying to you, playing you for a fool.

And in an odd way his past nuttiness bolsters his believability: He has worn the scorn of establishments as a medal. His own family isn’t for him. It doesn’t seem to mess with his swing.

He has what Mr. Trump has: star power. And there is the name. I recently was with a physical therapist—early middle age, suburban, not especially interested in politics—who, while working my back, asked if I knew Mr. Kennedy. No, I said. Is he drawing your interest?

She spoke admiringly of his family—of JFK, of RFK the father. She liked them and thought their politics were similar to hers. I asked if she had any living memory of JFK or RFK. No, she said, she was born after they were killed. And yet she spoke of them as if she remembered them.

I say watch him. He is going to be a force this year.

But Kennedy doesn't have a "larger message" -- or, rather, his "larger message" is in the service of his smaller message. Corporations are bad! For instance, they ... peddle vaccines! Which are bad! The government is lying to you ... about vaccines! And so on.

Instead of recoiling at Kennedy's dangerous nuttery, Noonan relegates it to parentheses. And her wording minimizes the harmfulness: "the idea that childhood vaccines are connected to autism" is actually the lie that childhood vaccines are connected to autism. But she doesn't care. She wants the race stirred up. If it's by a scientifically illiterate demagogue, who cares?

Then we have Andrew Sullivan:

Kennedy sees clearly how the Dems have become the party of big corporations, HR authoritarians, and the mega-wealthy.... Kennedy also feels in his bones the spiritual desolation out there, and grasps our duty to balance prosperity with care for the planet....

Bobby is now 69 years old, but seems much younger. Fun disclosure: I’ve known him personally through my old friend and his brother, Max, and always found him straightforward and disarming — if deeply troubled. This week, as I watched his campaign speech, and absorbed a long but riveting interview by David Samuels in Tablet, I was rustled out of my assumption that he’d simply gone nuts (as others in his family believe). Here is how Samuels frames the candidacy of “one of the most effective environmental activists in the country”:

[T]he case Kennedy made in his [2005 anti-vax article “Deadly Immunity”] was no more or less plausible and empirically grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it. [...] Now that conspiracy theories have gone mainstream, who better than RFK Jr. to authentically understand and communicate with a public that is rightly suspicious of the poisons in its water and air, the dishonesty of the public health bureaucracy, and the toxic nature of official discourse.

Kennedy is coherent, has an insane grasp of detail, and can speak extemporaneously with a skill not seen since Obama. He’s also broken — by tragedy, addiction, loss, and failure. (You can almost hear it in his cracked voice, caused by a rare disorder.) His father and uncle were murdered, his brother died of an overdose, he spent time hooked on heroin, and his ex-wife, Mary, hanged herself. But brokenness has its strengths in a leader, especially if you want to revive Americans’ faith in themselves and in their future. Imagine a president able to truly get the opioid crisis — because he remains in recovery. We are in some ways a broken country. And we will not heal by repeating the 2016 and 2020 presidential cycles.

Translation: Please please please persuade me he's not a whackjob! I desperately need another Obama to exalt as a secular demigod, because I am emotionally fourteen years old! (Kennedy's 2005 anti-vax article was not "empirically grounded." It was based on junk science, which is why it was withdrawn from circulation, as was the scientific paper it was based on, the principal author of which lost his medical license.)

And then there's Mark Halperin. I know he has no ongoing influence, but I suspect he's not alone in believing that Kennedy could have a major impact on the race if they weren't trying to silence him:

Kennedy’s chances of catching on are more challenging because he appears to be virtually blacklisted by the media....

The gatekeepers at the Dominant Media largely do not want to elevate Bobby, since they are all anti-anti-vax and they don’t want to do anything that might weaken Biden (and thus help to elect Trump).

But you need to pay attention to Kennedy’s message, a beautiful mosaic of passion, combining notes and themes from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and some of the blue collar/fighting for you of it all of Scranton Joe.

(Yes, the Kennedy family is "blue collar" now.)

I’m not over predicting here, but if Kennedy can get his message out I think he could cause much bigger problems for the incumbent than currently thought in most quarters. If he becomes the protest candidate repository for the giant pool of Democratic primary voters who are unenthused about Biden-Harris, watch out.

Who'll be the next pundit to say, Yeah, Kennedy has some nutball ideas, but when he proclaims [insert boilerplate anti-corporate pronouncement that would elicit pundit groans if uttered by Elizabeth Warren], you gotta hand it to him -- Matt Bai? Frank Bruni? David Brooks? Chuck Todd? I hope I'm wrong about this, but I think more good Kennedy coverage is coming.