On the Kennedys and the RFK Jr. Mirage
The 2020 U.S. election cycle was, obviously, crazy, especially at the presidential level, but one of the cycle’s most fascinating results, in retrospect, was the defeat of Joseph Kennedy III in the Democratic primaries for the 2020 Senate election in Massachusetts.
For the uninitiated, Massachusetts has long been the epicentre of the Kennedy family’s political success. Before becoming president in 1960, John F. Kennedy was first a member of the House of Representatives for six years while representing a Massachusetts constituency. He then became one of Massachusetts’ two senators in 1953. After being elected president, JFK vacated the seat and in a 1962 special election, his brother Ted Kennedy, a liberal and Irish-American hero in his own right, won the same seat, which he held until his death in 2009. Their grandfather, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., was a state representative and senator in the late 19th century, and both his great and great-great grandsons, Joseph Kennedy II and the III, served as House representatives from Massachusetts as well. The Kennedys are such a political dynasty that they’ve even begun having regal numbers!
The point in retelling this, admittedly, superficial political history is to emphasize that a Kennedy losing in Massachusetts is, ostensibly, shocking. Of course, the winner of the primary contest, Ed Markey, was and still is the incumbent senator, and incumbents have an innate electoral advantage, but to run against a Kennedy? In Massachusetts? Markey should have been dead on arrival. No offence to the senator, he seems like perfectly capable, but even in the state he represents, Markey wasn’t much of a celebrity. What kind of fight could a seemingly generic Democrat put up against Kennedy, a member of both Massachusetts and Democratic Party political royalty? And indeed, initial polling for the upcoming contest was not kind to Markey.
As it turns out, the primary contest took on a few different natures. Ideologically, Markey became a darling of the Democratic Party’s leftist factions, all while Kennedy took on the role of a more centrist, pro-business Democrat. Markey also was chiefly endorsed by his colleagues in the Democratic caucus in the Senate, whereas Kennedy’s list of endorsements is filled with names of his fellow House members. The former paradigm largely came into the fore as the campaign went on, and the latter one is probably the result of socialization; other senators worked directly with and got to know Markey on a more individual level, and vice versa for Kennedy with his fellow congresspeople.
What is most interesting was the question of why Kennedy was running, and this is what really killed Joseph Kennedy III’s campaign, because Kennedy did not have an answer to this fundamental question. Why run for senate, particularly in Massachusetts, against an incumbent member of your party? Because Massachusetts politics are the Kennedy family business. But of course, you can’t publicly say that, and given Markey’s low public profile, Kennedy ran as an outsider against the nameless Washington machination. This was a patently cynical and absurd strategy; even forgetting the fact that he is a member of America’s most iconic and prestigious political family, no candidate endorsed by Nancy Pelosi is an anti-establishment outsider.
While Kennedy may have started with a polling lead by virtue of name recognition alone, as soon as the soullessness of his campaign became obvious, Markey took and held on to the lead. After giving up his safe seat in the House to run, Joseph Kennedy III earned the unique title of being the first Kennedy to lose in Massachusetts.
Admittedly, the above 600 words was meant as a short, contextualizing segue into the real topic of this essay, which is the non-phenomena of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s campaign for the presidency in the Democratic primary, but the seeming end of Joseph Kennedy III’s political career is a fitting analogy for RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. is currently one of three “major” candidates in the Democratic primaries for the 2024 election. Along with Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr. is polling between high single digits and mid-double digits, but neither RFK Jr. nor Williamson are polling anywhere near competitively with Biden. Neither of the two has any political experience, beyond RFK Jr. being a Kennedy, and Williamson having ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020 as well. The two also habitually promote pseudoscientific nonsense, though Williamson’s more gentle brand of quackery is more inane hippie spirituality than RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine and other conspiratorial views on medicine and health.
Conspiracy theories aside, RFK Jr.’s politics offer little to the modern Democratic Party voter. He blames the U.S. for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, all while Russia is the one killing Ukrainians and citing inflated numbers of Ukrainian military casualties. RFK Jr. also leans into Republican rhetoric around “wokism” and is, at least instinctually, sympathetic to restrictions on abortion after three months of pregnancy. He is a regular guest on FOX News’ programming, as if to be the token “good” Democrat. In the ways most significant in modern U.S. politics, RFK Jr., his conspiracies, his isolationism, and his rhetoric has more in common with Republicans than he does with Democrats.
Frankly, I find RFK Jr. repulsive, with an unappealing platform and a penchant for odious conspiracy theories. However, the intention behind listing his beliefs and putting them into a partisan context isn’t to launch a shrill attack on him for being the wrong kind of Democrat. After all, us Canadians don’t have a say into who becomes president. Rather, what I am trying to highlight is that given the values he espouses, he lacks a natural constituency within the modern Democratic Party voter base. Sure, his positions on issues like Ukraine are similar to a common view among the far-left (though how many tankies are Democrats is in doubt) but many of his other positions, like on healthcare, are out of step with the far-left. What support RFK Jr. does have right now is among Republicans, who won’t vote in a Democratic primary, and among Democratic-leaning voters who are paying little attention, are modestly dissatisfied with the Biden administration, and are nostalgic for the Kennedys, and thus are instinctually approving of some candidate with the Kennedy name. As soon as the primaries near, and Democratic voters realize what RFK Jr. really stands for, they will eviscerate him. Biden will easily win the primary.
So why is RFK Jr. running for president as a Democrat when he is mainly interested in appealing to Republicans? I suggest two options. First, he is running for president as a Democrat because he, like other members of his family, feels that he is owed higher office by virtue of his birth, or second, that he is running as a Democrat who can appeal to the modern Republican base so that way he can join a Republican ticket or administration as a sign of non-partisanship. Either way, his campaign is incredibly cynical. Certainly, Joseph Kennedy III is a much better politician and person than RFK Jr., but they both represent the inevitable conclusion of politician dynasties in a liberal democracy. Being born into the right family is not something that should matter when it comes to being involved in politics.
To be sure, the Kennedys are not the only political dynasty in the U.S. Besides the Kennedys, there have also been Adams, Bushs, Clintons, Roosevelts, Byrds in Virginia, Cheneys in Wyoming, and plenty of others. Likewise, members of the Kennedy family who have served in politics have varying records; not all of them are as vacuous and nakedly ambitious as Joseph Kennedy III or Robert Kennedy Jr., as people like Ted Kennedy prove. But being a member of an established, well-connected family does not inherently qualify someone to serve in higher office, especially in a country with as ingrained a republican (small-”r,” of course) tradition as the United States, and, thankfully, as RFK Jr. will soon show, voters are starting to agree.