Posted on 06/06/2023 10:30:01 AM PDT by Signalman
BIDEN’S RFK DILEMMA — After years on the fringes, ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. is suddenly knocking on the door of mainstream relevance — and all it took was mounting a longshot presidential campaign.
Just in the last few days, Kennedy won a surprise endorsement from Twitter co-founder JACK DORSEY, was the subject of a deep dive by WaPo’s Michael Scherer into his long history of conspiratorial rhetoric, and spent two hours on Twitter Spaces with ELON MUSK and such ideological fellow-travelers as isolationist former Rep. TULSI GABBARD (D-Hawaii) and pro surfer-slash-vaccine skeptic KELLY SLATER.
The NYT wrapped up the Twitter event thusly: “[Kennedy] said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to ‘try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,’ called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians and said pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise of mass shootings in America.”
Needless to say, these views are out of step with the vast majority of the party whose nomination he’s ostensibly seeking. Supermajorities of Democratic voters support a national assault weapons ban, received the Covid-19 vaccine, and express confidence in the electoral process. Kennedy is on the opposite side of all of these issues.
And, yet, he’s constantly polling in the double digits against Biden. The latest CNN poll, taken less than three weeks ago, has him at 20 percent. Now, theories abound as to why this is happening:
Most obviously, the Kennedy name still means something in Democratic politics — quite a lot, according to the available evidence. For instance, ahead of the 2017 Senate special election in Alabama, one ROBERT KENNEDY JR. garnered 49 percent support among Democrats surveyed in one early poll. The catch is … he has no relation to the Kennedy political dynasty. Almost as obviously, voters with qualms about a second Biden term need to park their support somewhere. Poll after poll finds a sizable minority of Democrats worried about the 80-year-old incumbent’s age and what that portends, so their eyes are looking elsewhere. There’s also a phenomenon among Democrats that even with a young popular president (cough, BARACK OBAMA, cough), eyes can wander early on. In a September 2010 Gallup poll, for instance, then-Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON pulled in 37 percent of support while Obama pulled in 52 percent. Let’s be real: Kennedy poses no direct danger to Biden’s nomination, nor does any other Democrat for the foreseeable future. As is customary with a sitting president, the party apparatus has already chosen its man. There will be no debates; Kennedy will see no institutional support.
What he is, though, is an annoyance for Biden — and a potentially dangerous one. Besides using his legendary name and a national campaign megaphone to espouse fringe views, his outsize polling performance has served as a routine reminder of Biden’s vulnerabilities among his base.
Yet, for now, Biden world’s plan is to ignore him. The overwhelming sense inside the campaign and White House orbits is that any other posture would elevate him from a gadfly with a good name to a genuine contender.
They are counting on reporters and other Democrats to do the work of informing voters about Kennedy’s well-established views. Once that happens, as one Democratic strategist put it to us, they will “realize he’s running in the wrong party.” (This person, like others who spoke about Kennedy, did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about strategy.)
“Even the slightest press scrutiny is his biggest problem,” one Biden 2020 alum put it last night: “When Democrats see a candidate is anti-vaccination, anti-assault weapons ban, and a quasi 2020 election denier, their first thought is that this person must be a MAGA Republican.”
It’s a careful strategy that will seem frustratingly familiar to Biden’s Democratic critics, who have consistently wanted a more aggressive posture out of his White House and his campaign. But don’t expect a lot of attention to be paid to the hand-wringing — on RFK Jr. or most anything else.
One former Biden White House official and campaign aide whom Playbook spoke with last night agreed that ignoring Kennedy is probably the right move. But the person added that ignoring him doesn’t mean that you don’t keep an eye on him.
“It is a distraction, no doubt,” the person said. “And some could say just ignore it, which is how I would feel about it. At the same time, you’ve got to make sure that somebody is paying attention to it and pushing back.”
Problem? Jeeze
The cartoonist Michael Ramirez, who is generally conservative (but sometimes has anti-Trump cartoons), has an anti-RFK, Jr., cartoon today—implying he’s a clown.
So if they dump Biden, I'd expect Newsom, Whitmer, some other governor, or maybe a senator. If they pick a white male, then they might put a black female (other than Kamala) on the ticket--Val Demings might do the least damage in terms of scaring away white voters. Hopefully Buttigieg would not be seen as a viable nominee. Hillary would be happy to accept the nomination but there are probably too many Democrats who would resist that--after all, she blew what looked like a sure thing in 2016.
Is RFK, Jr. really a problem? Maybe to the left-wing wing-nuts, but not to the rest of America.
“...Playbook: What do you do with a problem like RFK Jr.?”
Help him louse up democrat machinery and cause a lot of peptic ulcers.
As for RFK, they apparently already killed one Kennedy, so what’s one more?
Only a Democrat would maintain allegiance to a “vaccine” that doesn’t prevent you from getting an illness, doesn’t keep you from spreading it, and has caused serious health issues for many. They are the true sheeple.
The precedent has been set......
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