RFK Jr vs the Democratic elites

RFK Jr vs the Democratic elites. By Sean Collins.

RFK Jr calls himself a ‘Kennedy Democrat’. He says ‘we need to bring this party back’ to the values of his father, his uncle, Franklin D Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.

Such calls touch a nerve among Democrats, who are uneasy about the party’s move away from its traditional values. Indeed, many of Kennedy’s stances will chime with old-school Democrats. On his campaign website, he pledges to ‘roll back the secrecy’ and ‘end the foreign wars’. And, in a blast against identity politics, he promises to seek ‘reconciliation across races, parties and divisions’.

 

In a particularly striking blast from the Democratic past, RFK Jr has also declared that ‘civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, are a high priority’ for him. That Democrats and media outlets are now censoring him only serves to prove his point.

Kennedy wasn’t always persona non grata. The media may currently be dismissing RFK Jr as a cranky outsider, but hitherto he had been treated as a serious Democratic player. John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all courted and then welcomed his support for their presidential campaigns. And after Obama’s election in 2008, he was considered a front-runner to head up the Environmental Protection Agency. Rolling Stone even named him one of its ‘100 Agents of Change’ in 2009. …

The attempts to sideline RFK Jr are now backfiring. So widespread is the distrust of the media and political establishment that the more it attempts to silence him, the more people think he must have something to say. As has often been said about Donald Trump, Kennedy has all of the right enemies.

The Democrats and their media allies can roll out as many fact-checks against Kennedy as they want, but their words lack credibility. They can say ‘trust the science’, but that doesn’t work when so many feel that ‘the science’ has frequently been distorted for partisan ends, as it often was during the Covid shutdowns. …

Senior Democrats clearly want a smooth coronation for Biden’s second term, and RFK Jr is an unwelcome spoiler. They want to write him off as the black sheep of the family. But their heavy-handed, censorious approach is not working.

On the Democrat side, he’d be a massive improvement over Biden.

RFK is the anti-establishment candidate among the Dems.