By Michael F. Duggan
I’ll put it up front: some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s statements in recent years have turned me off. That said, in last Wednesday’s live town hall meeting, with a sometimes less-than friendly audience and hosted by Elizabeth Vargas, he acquitted himself well. I watched it not wanting to like him or what I thought he was going to say and came away more impressed than I have been with any American candidate in a long time.
He took on all comers with no topics being out of bounds and gave thorough, thoughtful answers. His stated goal is to bring the Democratic Party back to the values the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society—the party that was largely destroyed by the murders of his uncle and father (before the Democrats become the pro-war, “Republican Lite” party of the Clintons, Obama, et al.). I believe in vaccines and am agnostic on the clarifications he gave of his position on vaccines, and will have to examine them more closely.
He seemed to frustrate Elizabeth Vargas, who prodded him for binary, either/or culture war replies. She seemed baffled that he wouldn’t take the bait, that he did not reply with hostile, divisive answers against those with whom he disagrees. His thoughtful, non-divisive answers to her questions appeared to frustrate her as things outside of her frame of reference.
I have a theory of presidential leadership that I call the “noble executive” model. It holds that the greatest presidents of the 20th century—TR, FDR, and JFK—were all high-minded aristocrats who had experienced a humbling health experience that gave them a strong sense of empathy and undercut snobbery and allowed them to do great things for all Americans. I believe that RFK, Jr., whose history of personal problems are manifold, could fit this mold. The fact that he is from a rich and famous family means that he does not need to tow the line on the orthodoxy and shibboleths of either party. He is his own man and appears to be telling the truth as he sees it. Most of his answers to tough questions on policy were much better than what I have heard from any political candidate in decades. The forthrightness and intelligence of his replies reminded me of the strength and honesty of his father’s answers in a November 1967 edition of Meet the Press.
When I was young, the elder Robert Kennedy, the transformed Bobby of the 1963-68 period, was one of my political touchstones. His assassination is my earliest political memory. What our country needs is not further division, but unity, if it is still possible. RFK, Jr. reminds me of the lost potential of the 1960s. The death of his uncle, his father, and Martin Luther King, Jr. marked the death of a vigorous, tough-minded, result-oriented kind of liberalism in this country that it has never regained. Since then the Democratic Party and the political left have been characterized by watered-down mediocrity with a track record of ineffectiveness or else self-defeating politically correct stridency. The U.S. does not need more “centralist” mediocrities like Biden or, on the right, populist demagogues like Trump. What we need is genuine leadership, redeeming leadership. I do not know if Robert Kennedy, Jr. is the man who can provide it, but last Wednesday, even with his afflicted voice, he sounded as if he could be.
The problem I have with Kennedy is this: right after seeing his strong performance in the town hall event, I saw a clip from a conference with anti-vaxxers in which Kennedy spouted some batshit about how it is possible that the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 might have been the result of vaccine research. This is the kind of thing that reels me back in from Kennedy. There are charlatans (people who know that they are trying to fool you), and there are cranks (people who subscribe to the delusions they push). I suspect that Kennedy falls under the later. The broader issue is that his sensible positions on other issues of domestic and foreign policy may be tainted and dismissed because of the crazy stuff that gives his opponents ammunition. The question is whether these views should disqualify him.
Already the guardians of the status quo, like Vanity Fair, are attacking his Wednesday night performance. The major networks and newspapers snubbed him altogether, and some, like the Los Angeles Times, tried to poison the well before the event and then provided a hostile after-action report. Even though Kennedy has some quirky and even dangerously wrongheaded views, his stated goals of uniting the nation, returning the Democratic party back to its first principles, and demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy, are powerful and eloquent and deserve our attention and consideration. With Democrats backing a catastrophic war in Ukraine, and the GOP willing to embrace strongman extremism, Kennedy’s views may constitute the lesser danger among the current options. The Democratic establishment is mobilizing to destroy his candidacy, and they may succeed.
My advice is that before rejecting him and his candidacy outright, take a look at his performance from last week’s town hall meeting and then weigh him against the others.
Postscript
I renounce the benefit of the doubt that I once extended to Kennedy.