"My fellow Americans. I told you three years ago that I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. I reminded you that there’s an entire generation of Democratic leaders who stand behind me. They are the future of this country. One of them is the future of this office. It's time for them to have their chance to step forward and lead this great nation. It has been my responsibility and pleasure these last three years to serve as your president but I will not seek a second term. I look forward, as I'm sure you do, too, to an open, free, and fair primary process that will choose a fresh Democratic candidate who will surely succeed me in office. To that end, I will finish my term with the same strength and vigor with which I began it. Thank you and may God bless the United States of America." —Joe Biden, in the address he didn't give on August 28, 2023.
Had Biden dropped out last year, as he surely should have, there would have been whispers aplenty about how he'd really dropped out because of his declining mental condition, as part of a backroom deal to protect Hunter Biden, or because he just looked like too much of a loser in '24 after Afghanistan, inflation, and the Russo-Ukraine War.
But the whispers would have gone nearly silent just as soon as the primary candidates lined up because the press is always after the shiny new thing.
Surely, administration stalwarts Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg would have tossed their hats into the ring once more. The usual selection of senators and governors surely couldn't resist the siren call of an open primary.
Plus one semi-outsider with money to spare and a last name carrying all the nostalgia of Camelot and the 1968 we didn't get — the 1968 that was shattered by the assassinations of MLK and RFK Sr.
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I'm not sure there's a scenario where RFK Jr wouldn't have won the Democrat nomination for president.
How would a Kennedy vs Trump race play out? It's a purely hypothetical situation, so there's no way to predict the outcome with any confidence. What I am confident of is that I'd much rather have Kennedy endorsing Trump than running against him.
But it didn't work out that way because Democrats felt the need to lie and cheat their way into getting stuck with the weakest possible candidate from their not-very-impressive bench. They had to sew up the primaries so that only Biden could win. They had to hide Biden's mental and physical decline until just weeks before their nominating convention. They had no choice but to settle on Harris — unproven, untested, and unready — because not even the cabal that kicked Biden to the curb dared to give the same lousy treatment to Harris. Summarily dismiss the first woman of color? That would have been more off-brand than New Coke.
Having shut Kennedy out, Democrats added insult to injury by infiltrating his campaign and doing everything they could to keep him off of state ballots as an independent. Democrats treated Kennedy — a Kennedy! — so badly that he became a Trump voter.
For which I am almost indescribably grateful.
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