Environmental lawyer, independent candidate for the White House, staunch anti-vaccinationist and conspiracy theorist. If it didn’t come from America’s most powerful political brand, 70-year-old Robert Kennedy Jr. would probably have been put out of the running for next November’s presidential election. His heavy family heritage, however, as the son of Senator Bobby Kennedy and the nephew of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy, tends to make him an outsider regulator, despite accusations of “defection” from his former fellow Democrats, but also the resounding distancing of most of his relatives from his election campaign.
The scion of the country’s most famous Democratic family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entered the race as an independent, although in recent months there has been a concerted effort by Democrats to prevent him from undermining the candidacy of incumbent President Joe Biden. It is, after all, no secret that Robert Kennedy Jr. criticized the intention of the “planetary” to contest the renewal of his term, expecting due to his younger age and nickname to win the party nomination for this year’s elections. When this simply did not happen in 2023, Bobby Kennedy’s son defected from the Democrats, from whose bosom he had already begun to move away from in 2010 and although Joe Biden repeats as a chorus in recent days that he retains the bust of his father his running mate, in a prominent position, in the Oval Office.
For Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, the Democrats’ refusal to nominate him as their presidential candidate against Donald Trump has quickly put them on the defensive, as the current US president’s campaign staff has steadily turned its attention to retaining traditional Democratic party voters. , in front of the new “knight” of Camelot.
Conspiracy theories
The independent US presidential candidate’s engagement with the public spans decades and began in a tragic way, when the assassination of his father, Bobby, came to confirm the dramatic fate of the Kennedys, a few days after he had secured the Democratic nomination in the primaries election of 1968. Fifty years later, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. questioned the assassination of his father, who fought head-on with organized crime and passionately defended human rights, leaving open space for conspiracy theories to flourish.
“My childhood was a very special time in American history, and our home was really central to what was happening not only in government, but in the larger culture. It was filled with civil rights leaders, with students from Indonesia and from African countries who were then, for the first time, able to govern themselves,” described Robert Kennedy Jr. in 2018, on the occasion of the release of his book “American Values: Lessons That got from my family,” remarking with a strong dose of self-criticism that “it might be easy to be cynical about politics and politicians now, but for my family the ability to participate in politics was important.”
“Outcast”
The rest of the Kennedy family, however, publicly embraced re-electionist Joe Biden at his recent speech in Philadelphia, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sister, Kerry, declaring that “President Biden has been a champion of all rights and freedoms that my father and uncle stood for,” describing the current US president as a natural successor to the Kennedy legacy.
“We cannot do anything that in any way takes away even one vote from President Biden,” Nestor of the Joseph P. Kennedy II family, the eldest brother of the Kennedys and a former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, noting wistfully that “you put the name Kennedy on the ballot and the Democrats will feel divided.”
And those of the Kennedys who couldn’t attend Joe Biden’s campaign speech in Pennsylvania rushed to cross the threshold of the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, emphatically underlining their attachment to family traditions, that is, their Irish origins. , but also their loyalty to the Democratic party and its official candidate Joe Biden.
He gallops up
Despite family estrangement, Robert Kennedy Jr. is polling the highest ever for an independent candidate for the US presidency, surpassing even Ross Perot, the billionaire who entered the race in the 1990s, while his inroads into Donald Trump’s audience in recent times has somewhat encouraged the Democrats, who believed that Kennedy would cause them undue harm. Nevertheless, the independent president has already secured the “green light” to enter the presidential election in Michigan (where Muslim Americans fear backlash over US support for Israel) and has several states left to secure his candidacy, as he is not supported by Republicans or Democrats.
Trojan Horse;
With a campaign slogan of “healing America”, Robert Kennedy Jr. became widely known to the American public during the coronavirus pandemic, when he emerged as a leading figure of anti-vaccinationists, claiming that COVID-19 was ethnically specific, i.e. that it “aimed to attack Caucasians and Blacks,” while “the people who have the most immunity are the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese,” as he said, after which he was accused of anti-Semitism.
Even more sensational were his views on the lockdown, when he commented on the restrictions that had been imposed that “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps in Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” sparking massive backlash from the global Israeli community and beyond.
For some of the Democrats he is described as a Trojan horse of Donald Trump to deprive them of a critical mass of votes, as they attribute to him a certain association with the banker Timothy Mellon, since he donated money to both Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., if and the latter has deforested the former “planetary” as he has hired some of his former close associates. At the same time, Kennedy’s “anti-establishment” speech coupled with his heavy-handed last name are increasingly draining funders and momentum from Trump’s candidacy, with the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign staff calling him “leftist and liberal,” distancing him with every way from the conservative base.
However, the polls also appear divided as to the losses Kennedy’s candidacy is causing to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as the Fox News poll in Michigan gave Kennedy a 9% percentage, with Donald Trump first at 42% and second Joe Biden with 40%.
At the same time, however, the Kennedy candidacy does not seem to attract disaffected young, African-American, Latino and female Democratic voters, nor to win the votes of Muslim Americans, since he has called Israel a “moral nation.”
The scene has changed, however, in the latest NBC News poll, where Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by 2 percentage points, 46% to 44% respectively, but Biden comes in first with 39%, followed by Donald Trump with 37%, when three other independent candidates are added to the questionnaire, bringing Robert Kennedy third with 13%.
Primarily, however, Republican voters are far more favorable about Kennedy’s candidacy (with 40% favorable and 15% unfavorable) than Democratic voters (16% favorable and 53% unfavorable), forcing Donald Trump to concede about the Kennedy candidacy that “they say it hurts Biden. I’m not sure that’s true and I think it probably hurts both of [us].” “But it might hurt Biden a little more, don’t you know,” concluded the former planet lord.
Trump’s… suspicions are proving to be rather well-founded about the blow that Robert Kennedy Jr. is causing to his traditional electoral base, as his unconventional behavior catapults him gradually winning over the temper of “outraged” American voters, both during the pandemic, but and earlier, when Kennedy fought head-on as an environmental lawyer, suing global environmental giants and securing judgments against General Electric and ExxonMobil.
His “alternative” culture culminated in his involvement in the WaterKeeper Alliance, which he served as president for 21 years, a clean water nonprofit that protects 2.7 million miles of waterways with more than a million volunteers in United States and 46 other countries, as he boasts, while his slogan “Make the Earth Great Again” directly refers to Donald Trump’s motto, provoking his fanatical followers.
His program
Although a graduate of Harvard and the London School of Economics, Kennedy has advocated deep cuts in military spending while heralding the return of American industry and support for small and medium-sized businesses. For America’s role in international politics, he supports cutting military spending, but also limiting the United States’ participation in the United Nations. He remains, however, in favor of increasing aid to Israel, while pledging to fight pollution, oil drilling and mining, fighting for the preservation of wildlife and rainforests, always linking environmental governance to economic governance. prosperity.
