... there is room for somebody ... to try to run the same play as Eugene McCarthy in 1968 or Pat Buchanan in 1992 or for that matter Bernie Sanders in 2016 — to offer themselves as a protest candidate, to either channel hidden grievances or discover, through their campaign, what those grievances might be."Anti-corporate crankishness" is still powerful on the left, of course, but it generally takes the form of wondering why the rich run everything and pay next to nothing in taxes while endeavoring to yoke us to a fossil-fuel economy forever. Most of us don't think vaccines are the fat cats' greatest crime -- we resent drug companies mostly because they make healthcare in America so damn expensive.
Right now the only major figure auditioning for that role is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted anti-vaccine activist who opened his own campaign in Boston earlier this week. He’s an interesting test case, because while he’s way outside the current liberal mainstream, his name trades on a distinctive kind of older-Democrat nostalgia, while his anti-corporate crankishness speaks to a tendency that used to be powerful on the left, before Trumpism absorbed a lot of paranoid energy and conspiracism.
And when Douthat talks about "older-Democrat nostalgia" for the Kennedy family, he's talking about blue-collar white Democrats, many of whom have drifted away from the party in the past half century. But the liberals who respond to RFK Jr.-style health crankery -- or used to respond to it before right-wing anti-vaxxers because his main audience -- tend to be economically upmarket. In that social stratum, they've vastly outnumbered by educated Democrats who admire Anthony Fauci and believe in vaccines.
Douthat acknowledges that Kennedy is unlikely to deny Biden the nomination, or even make serious inroads against him. But he takes Kennedy's campaign seriously, as does David Corn at Mother Jones:
... [Kennedy's] name still has cachet. A USA Today/Suffolk University Poll found that 14 percent of voters who backed Biden in 2020 would support RFK Jr. He’s not likely to threaten Biden in the Democratic primaries (assuming Biden runs), but he can be a distraction. And that’s a problem....I don't trust that 14% number -- I'd bet that many of those respondents don't know much about Kennedy beyond his name and just want an alternative to Biden. But it should be absurdly easy for Biden to let people know who Kennedy is.
[Kennedy and Marianne Williamson] can make things messy. Do Democrats really want a fuss over whether Biden will deign to debate these marginal candidates? The media, though, will eat it up. And Kennedy cannot champion his main cause without indicting Biden as one of the villains in the grand Covid conspiracy he has railed against.
And not just the vaccine crankery, which was publicly rejected by three of his siblings a year before the pandemic started, or the conspiracy theories about 5G.
All Biden needs to do is link Kennedy to MAGA. And that's a simple task.
As Vanity Fair's Caleb Ecarma wrote earlier this month,
According to CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, the fantastical long shot bid was contrived by Trumpworld power broker Steve Bannon, who had reportedly spent months urging Kennedy to run in the hopes that he might sow chaos on the left.... Kennedy also has ties to other shady figures in Donald Trump’s orbit: In July 2021, as the right’s hysteria over COVID-19 vaccines was in full swing, a photo shared on Instagram showed Kennedy posing with Roger Stone, the notorious “dirty trickster” of the Republican Party, and Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser turned QAnon influencer. The picture was reportedly taken at an event hosted by ReAwaken America, a Christian nationalist touring group made for and by QAnon followers, anti-vaxxers, and election deniers....Here's that picture, with Flynn on the left and Roger Stone on the right. The woman is Charlene Bollenger, described by AP as an "anti-vaccine profiteer." You can read more about her here.)
Stone likes Kennedy so much he's proposed that Trump should pick him as his running mate.
We're told that Bannon is the person behind Kennedy's run, but this reeks of Stone, who likes trolling Democrats with stunt candidacies. (Recall that in 2010 Stone backed a gubernatorial campaign by a convicted madam, Kristin Davis. Davis's clients included former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who'd resigned after some of his other interactions with prostitutes were unearthed.) Stone now says this about Kennedy:
While the odds of RFK wresting the presidential nomination from the Democrat establishment candidate are narrow, the prospects of Kennedy impacting the process are great. I believe that if he can pull together a minimally effective campaign, he could garner as much as a third of the Democrat primary vote....So Stone openly portrays Kennedy's candidacy as a ratfuck. And then he wants Trump to pick Kennedy as his running mate, to form what Stone calls a "dream ticket."
No incumbent president in modern times who faced but beat back a significant challenge for re-nomination has gone on to be re-elected.
If Kennedy becomes a problem for Biden, all Biden needs to do is talk about Kennedy's ties to Trump World (and to Trump himself, who met with Kennedy and reportedly promised to put him in charge of a commission on vaccine safety, although he never followed through).
(Caption to the photo above: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gestures while entering the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Jan. 10, 2017.")
Biden can -- accurately -- call Kennedy a MAGA wolf in Democratic clothing. And that should be the end of that.
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