He was never a serious candidate.
For all the recent finger-wagging between Democrats and Republicans over who’s the weirdest, the runaway winner in the weirdo Olympics is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Between the creepiness of his personal peccadillos to brain worms(!) to leaving a bear corpse in Central Park(!!), RFK Jr. is a very odd duck.
Then, there’s the issue with his voice. I’m not saying this to be cruel, but the bottom line is that politics is an image-driven enterprise. It’s just not good to sound like a lawnmower.
But he had a famous name, the faint whiff of legitimacy, and the bankroll of a billionaire (courtesy of his running mate, Nicole Shanahan). That combination isn’t enough to take you all the way to the finish line, but it certainly gets your foot in the door.
And that was enough to terrify the Democrats.
So they conspired to undermine his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Just as they did to protect Hillary Clinton, they rigged the rules and tilted the playing field. This is what they do. In the past, other Democrats bent their knees accordingly and went along with it (looking at you, Bernie Sanders), and the Democrats assumed RFK Jr. would do the same.
But that’s the thing with weirdos: They’re constantly surprising you.
Instead of taking his lumps and kissing the crown, RFK Jr. went rogue, launching an independent campaign for the presidency. He had a fun little commercial at the Super Bowl and did all the normal interviews, but his candidacy never really went anywhere.
Curiously, he was such a weird figure, Republicans and Democrats were unsure how to attack him — or even if they should. Neither side could tell who RFK Jr. was helping or hurting. On one hand, he’s a Kennedy, for crying out loud — an environmental attorney! That’s about as Donkey-ish as it gets. But then again, his skepticism of COVID vaccines and his chumminess with conservatives gave liberals pause. It’s still an open question.
Either way, it seems we’re going to find out for sure: The rumors are swirling that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will endorse Donald Trump on Friday.
Statisticians and pollsters are still crunching the numbers (and arguing over what they mean), but most evidence indicates that RFK Jr. leaving the race would benefit Donald Trump.
But that’s not going to be the true benefit of his endorsement. It’s actually bigger than that.
This is the week of the Democratic National Convention — the Democrats’ high-water mark. Their entire strategy is to use Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech to kick off their campaign in earnest, delivering Democrats up and down the ticket the momentum they’ll need to carry them to November. And you can bet your bottom dollar that among the key messages in Harris’s speech will be “us versus them” — the power of light to defeat the darkness of evil. (It’s interesting: For all the talk about the GOP being influenced by organized religion, Democrats speak in apocalyptic prose so often, it’s almost a cliché. They might not believe in Revelations, but they sure love the imagery.)
In politics, momentum is an elusive thing. Sometimes, when you lose it, you never get it back.
The value of a potential RFK Jr. endorsement is that it’s deadweight on the Democrats’ post-convention momentum. He saps their rocket fuel. Next week, instead of everyone talking about the DNC and how beautiful/intelligent/Obama-y Harris was, people will be talking, at least in part, about RFK Jr.’s endorsement.
And what the hell it means.
That’s the final gift we’ve received from the strange and peculiar Kennedy: Because he’s so unusual, we still don’t know what the poll numbers truly mean. Everything’s debatable. So it’ll give us something new to debate on TV… instead of talking about Kamala Harris’s big moment.
(Okay, I’m not saying it’s the greatest gift in the world, but at least it’s better than a dead bear.)
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