Bargains galore this weekend on a Phila street: Kennedy leftovers and myriad junk. (Polman photo)
How sad it is to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasting the last vestiges of fairy dust from the family brand. His prospects of winning the ’24 Democratic presidential nomination are…how to say this nicely…quite minimal; it’s hard to envision the nod going to a guy who thinks that 5G mobile networks are plotting to ferret out the anti-vaxxers, and that all anti-vaxxers are being hunted like Anne Frank was. The most charitable thing I can say about the slain RFK’s son is that in a brood of 11 children, there was bound to be at least one whacko.
Arguably saddest of all – OK, what’s most pathetic – is that Junior somehow thought last week that flying to Boston for his candidacy announcement, so that he could trade on his family’s roots, could somehow cloak him in “Kennedy magic,” a term I’ve placed between quotation marks because, let’s face it, the magic is kaput and, in politics, the brand has as much salience these days as the rotary phone.
We’re a long long way from the halcyon myth-making era when the press gushed about so-called Camelot and a respected author like William Manchester referred to JFK’s family, friends, and aides as “the Quality” – enjoying, as they did, “membership in the Quality” (Manchester capitalized that word, not I). But it behooves us to remember that the political trail since 1960 has long been littered with flaming Kennedy wreckage. With the sole exception of RFK Jr.’s Uncle Teddy, who for decades enjoyed his Senate sinecure in deep-blue Massachusetts, not a single Kennedy has ever won a statewide or nationwide race.
There was RFK Jr.’s oldest brother, Joseph Kennedy II, a ’90s Massachusetts congressman who was featured on a magazine cover with the headline “The Dumbest Kennedy.” His 1998 gubernatorial hopes were dashed when his ex-wife wrote a nasty tell-all book and his brother Michael was outed for conducting a years-long affair with a teenage baby sitter.
There was Uncle Teddy, who blew up his 1980 presidential bid on the launching pad by filibustering his answer to a simple question. He was asked: Why do you want to be president? His response (this is only an excerpt): “…the energies and the resourcefulness of this nation, I think, should be focused on these problems in a way that brings a sense of, uh, restoration, uh, in this country by its people to, in dealing with the problems we face, primarily the issues on the economy, the problems of inflation, and the problems of, uh, energy. And, uh, I would basically feel that, uh, that it’s imperative for this country to move either move forward, that it can’t stand still. Or otherwise it moves backward.”
There was RFK Jr.’s oldest sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who served as Maryland’s number two official, but lost her 2002 gubernatorial race in one of the nation’s bluest states. She was the first Democrat in 40 years to lose that contest; according to The Baltimore Sun, the reason was obvious: “Townsend toiled to overcome the perception that she was a political lightweight who couldn’t string paragraphs into a coherent speech, who froze when a television camera focused on her or when a reporter asked an unexpected question.”
There was RFK Jr.’s cousin, Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy, who twice considered running statewide for a Senate seat, but twice decided otherwise, in part because of what happened in 2006, when he was addicted to pills, crashed his Mustang into a Capitol Hill security barrier at 3 in the morning, and wound up pleading guilty to DUI and other charges.
There was RFK Jr.’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, who decided in 2008 that she wanted a Senate seat, but after outing herself as vague and vapid in a newspaper interview (“These are the issues that I would expect, I mean, I am a Democrat, that is, you know, I am trying to become a Democratic senator, so I don’t, um, I mean, there are issues along the way, that I’m sure that people have differences of opinion. There’s controversies in all these areas”), she decided – to relieved party applause – that she didn’t want the seat after all.
And there was RFK Jr.’s nephew, Massachusetts congressman Joseph Kennedy III, who decided in 2020 that the purportedly magic Kennedy name would propel him to victory in a Senate Democratic primary, only to find himself sliced and diced on primary night by 11 percentage points.
So now comes RFK Jr., who equates Anthony Fauci with “fascism,” and whose preposterous bid to challenge Joe Biden is backed by the likes of Steve Bannon and other meddling MAGAts who’d love nothing more than to bleed the incumbent president.
You may remember a line that Ted Kennedy delivered at the 1980 Democratic convention: “The hope still lives and the dream shall never die!” Now it’s a waking nightmare. With apologies to JFK for mutilating a line he delivered in 1961, it’s grievously clear, today, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of grifter.