Political Stunts That Worry Me

Robert Kennedy, Jr.

One of the earlies memories I have as a child was being sent home from school because of the assasination of the President. When I got home, I found my mother on the bed, in tears. I grew up in the middle of the Kennedy spell, and they have been in my life, all my life. From that moment when I realized we had something called a “president” and then he was killed and made my mother cry, to the murder of Bobby Kennedy, then Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquidick scandal, to the untimely accidental death of the son of the President, John F. Kennedy. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, a female from the clan, has been a quiet, steady presence all these years.

Now we have another Kennedy making news again. Robert, namesake of his father Bobby, is running for President as a Democrat. I just read an interview with him by New Yorker editor David Remnick. I highly recommend reading this short interview; it is an eye opening and contentious conversation.

I have lived through a number of candidates for president who managed to mess up elections for one side or the other: Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Bernie Sanders and now potentially Kennedy. We can’t afford to mess around with this next Presidential election, Trump should not be President again. What’s scary about Kennedy is that he is using his family name and legacy—the Cameloty part of it, not the scandals— to sound reasonable, espousing values that seem honorable. He sounds good on the face of it, if you don’t dig too deep. But in the interview with David Remnick, who in his questions digs deep very quickly, you see a very strange person. He is full of ant-vacination and public health conspiracies, arrogant anti-science claims, a hostile naivite about the media, and he is convinced that his father and uncle were killed by the CIA. Kennedy has never run for anything nor held public office, yet, in the tradition of Trump, he thinks he knows enough to be good at the job. His campaign slogan is “Heal the Divide,” a worrisome slogan because we all want that, certainly. If he is able to sway enough people with his name and his skillfull Kennedy-speak, he could cause problems. Members of his own family don’t back him.

Politico thinks he really doesn’t want the job, he just wants the attention. The most bizarre part of his candidacy thus far was indeed an attention getting stunt: he was videotaped doing push-ups and bench presses, an egocentric move directed at the current president’s advancing age.

It’s amazing what our politics has come to.