Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign goes to considerable lengths to profess its potential appeal to people across the partisan and ideological landscape. Despite his heavy investment in conspiracy theories involving virtually the entire range of daily life in America, the candidate regularly portrays himself as a political peacemaker who can get rid of red-blue polarization. However, Kennedy’s message seems more tailored to left-leaning voters disgruntled with Biden than to conservatives. And his stance on one key issue means he can’t really outflank the president on the left.
The RFK Jr. crusade is primarily focused on his relentless belief in the “corporate capture” of government on every front, from defense to health care to scientific research to agriculture to his original policy field, the environment. Pharma and Big Ag and the medical profession and the military-industrial complex and chemical companies are the preeminent villains of his lurid tale of American Carnage (similar in ferocity but not in actual content to Donald Trump’s). Any voters with even a vague commitment to free markets and corporate virtue could not put up with much exposure to RFK Jr.’s message. The more you listen to the candidate and his supporters’ intense anger over processed food and obesity and overdevelopment, the less you can imagine any common ground with the fast-food-chomping real-estate developer of Mar-a-Lago.
This was evident at Kennedy’s March 26 rally in Oakland, California, where he announced fellow ex-Democrat Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. The Bay Area setting reinforced the feeling of a left-wing insurgency. When Kennedy spoke fondly of his father’s cozy relationship with the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, you knew you were far away not only from the Republican Party but from the kind of centrist independent movement represented by No Labels.
Yes, there were occasional references among the long line of speakers to topics of special interest to people who might otherwise support Donald Trump, such as border security and the national debt. And some MAGA voters have always admired RFK Jr. for his hostility to COVID-19 vaccines and lockdown strategies. But Shanahan’s approach to the issues sounded more Crunchy Mom than red-meat MAGA. After observing that her first political engagement was as “an anti-war activist,” the new veep prospect quickly went into her top contemporary concern:
We are facing a crisis in reproductive health, and that’s embedded in the larger epidemic of chronic disease …
There are three main causes. One, is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food, water, and soil, like the pesticide residues, the industrial pollutants, the microplastics, the PFAs, the food additives, and the “forever chemicals” that have contaminated nearly every human cell.
Second is electromagnetic pollution … As Bobby says, we need to investigate every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic that is devouring our nation from the inside.
Third, I’m sorry to say, is our own medications. Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription after another after another, one shot after another and another, throughout the course of
childhood. Conditions like autism used to be rare. One in ten thousand. Now it is one in 22 here in California. Allergies. Obesity. Anxiety. Depression. Our children are not well.
There wasn’t a word about “wokeness” or the evils of identity politics or, for that matter, the need for common-sense compromise between liberals and conservatives.
When Kennedy addressed the crowd in Oakland, he repeatedly denounced the “corporate-captured uniparty” of Biden and Trump. Hardly any restive Republicans think there’s no difference between the 45th and 46th presidents. But it’s a distinct position on the political left, which overlaps with a huge reservoir of deeply alienated young voters who appear ripe for defection from the Democratic Party they have supported in recent elections.
You’d think an independent presidential campaign desperately trying to break out of third place would follow political opportunity, and its own inclinations, into a robust progressive revolt against Joe Biden.
However, there’s a huge obstacle between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and any hope that he could become 2024’s pied piper of progressive youth, much as his dad became 56 years ago. It’s his intensely pro-Israel position in its war with Hamas. Read Kennedy’s assessment of the Middle East from last December, when Israel’s military operations in Gaza were fully and lethally underway, and imagine the reaction of young supporters of a permanent cease-fire:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose criticism of Ukraine war funding intrigued some Biden critics, is less critical of Israel than the president.
“Israel is doing more right now to protect human life, and has done more over the past 16 years to avoid this outcome, than we would expect of any nation in the world,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo this week.
In Oakland, Shanahan called RFK Jr. the “only anti-war candidate today, [the] only peace candidate.” However, Kennedy opposes a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. And he recently explained his fundamental position on war and peace to Reuters in a way that would seem to exclude any peacemaking in the Middle East on terms other than Israel’s:
Israel did not choose this war, he said, comparing it to U.S. involvement in World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kennedy said Hamas was to blame for Gaza’s destruction for failing to embrace a two-state solution and for firing thousands of missiles into Israeli cities like Tel Aviv.
“Any other nation that was adjacent to a neighboring nation that was bombing it with rockets, sending commandos over to murder its citizens, pledging itself to murder every person in that nation and annihilate it, would go and level it with aerial bombardment,” Kennedy said.
“But Israel is a moral nation. So it didn’t do that. Instead, it built an iron dome to protect itself so it would not have to go into Gaza.”
He said Hamas gave Israeli leaders no choice after fighters stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
On the issue that has begun to define the young progressive revolt against Biden (or, arguably, the “uniparty” of Biden and Trump), RFK Jr. would seem to have placed himself beyond the pale. So whatever else it becomes, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket isn’t going to be perceived as a beacon of moral clarity in a corrupt system addicted to war.
That has to be of some comfort to the Biden campaign as it watches polls showing Kennedy beginning to hurt him more than Trump. I’m sure they have strategies designed to warn potential RFK Jr. voters they are just helping Trump return to the White House, and to keep Kennedy off the ballot altogether wherever that’s possible. But for undecided young progressives who are motivated more by the cease-fire movement than by fear of “electromagnetic pollution” or vaccines, there may be a ceiling of support for the candidate of many conspiracy theories.
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