by Paul Kengor
They are “in love with death.”
So said Bobby Kennedy before his tragic assassination in June 1968: “What my father said about businessmen applies to liberals. They’re sons of bitches … in love with death.”
That eye-opening RFK quotation has been reported a handful of times in various RFK biographies. The biographers, mostly liberals themselves, have failed to elaborate on what exactly RFK meant (and they usually keep the businessmen part of the quote and drop the part on liberals). Nonetheless, the quote conveys the reality that RFK was, at best, highly conflicted about the liberals in his party. Culturally and morally, he was a conservative. He was intensely opposed to abortion, feminism, and homosexual rights. On abortion, his party has plainly become the Party of Death. Had RFK lived to see Roe v. Wade and its subsequent 63 million abortions, the devout Roman Catholic would have been aghast.
Those who knew him well said that Bobby Kennedy was more like a monk than a politician. Pensive and prayerful, he might have been better suited to monastic life. But instead, he went into politics, setting aside priestly celibacy for marriage to his wife Ethel. The couple gave the gift of life to 11 children, the last of whom (Rory) was in his wife’s womb as she held RFK’s hand while he was dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night of June 5, 1968.
Among those kids was Bobby and Ethel’s third: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And this younger RFK reminds me of his father, especially in his admirable independence and willingness to buck the party line and be his own man. Like his dad, he stands against the nuts in the liberal wing of his party.
It is that tendency that prompted RFK Jr. to buck the entirety of his party’s advocacy of vaccine mandates — that is, the mandatory mRNA shots forced upon Americans at threat of losing their jobs, being denied admission to colleges, being kicked out of the military, and more. Our health and constitutional religious or conscience objections be damned. For this purported crime against humanity, when you google “RFK Jr.,” a nasty little box pops up on your screen that smears him with this:
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American environmental lawyer and author known for promoting anti-vaccine propaganda and health-related conspiracy theories.
Hah, propagandist and conspiracy theorist! And for what? For opposing the coerced vaccination of teens at no risk of death from COVID but at risk of myocarditis from mRNA shots? RFK Jr. realized the absurdity of that mass policy and the psychosis of groupthink by Joe Biden and the Democrats. Talk about being in love with death.
But this Kennedy, like his old man, hasn’t stopped fighting. And now, he has bucked the party line again by announcing his run for president.
Kennedy surely said that to loud applause from traditional Democrats watching and cheering from the safety of their private living rooms. His position is common sense. And yet, it flies in the face of the unhinged Joe Biden and fellow cultural revolutionaries who want teenagers to get gender-mutilation surgery without their parents’ permission. Again, talk about being in love with death.
Will he succeed? My sense is no. The Democratic Party will go back to Biden as their safest bet to keep Donald Trump out of the White House (assuming that Trump is the GOP nominee). The Democrat nominees in 2016 and 2020 got millions more votes than Trump, even with back-to-back unpopular and uninspiring Democrat nominees, and they surely feel that they can do it again in 2024. Yes, Donald Trump has a committed base that would light itself on fire for the man, but millions of liberals would light themselves on fire to dash to the voting booth against him. Democrats are convinced that Donald Trump cannot get 50 percent of the vote. So am I. Republicans will not win with a candidate who can’t get close to 50 percent.
That is, unless RFK Jr. ultimately goes third party.
A potential scenario is a Kennedy presidential bid that sees him falling short of the Democratic nomination but running as a third party. If he did that, I could easily see RFK Jr. nabbing 20 percent of the vote in 2024, akin to Ross Perot’s 19 percent in 1992, which allowed Bill Clinton to win the presidency that year with only 43 percent. Or it could be similar to what happened in 1968, with Richard Nixon winning with 43 percent against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and third-party independent George Wallace, or in 1912 with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican William Howard Taft, and Teddy Roosevelt bolting to a third party, with Socialist Eugene Debs as a fourth candidate. Wilson won with only 42 percent of the vote.
Such is the only scenario in which I could see Donald Trump winning the presidency with, say, 46 percent of the vote. Trump’s ceiling is in the mid–40 percent range. With the rare exception of Trump’s 2016 win, a major-party nominee can win the presidency in that range only when a third-party candidate pulls votes. All along, I’ve felt that Trump’s only chance in 2024 is via the entrance of a third-party candidate who takes votes from Biden.
If RFK goes third party, it would be doomsday for Democrats. It could bring Donald Trump back to the White House. And if that happens, Democrats have only themselves to blame for their idiotic, authoritarian policies on everything from vaccine mandates to drag queen story hours to transgender athletes bullying girls.
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Paul Kengor is Editor of The American Spectator. Dr. Kengor is also a professor of political science at Grove City College, a senior academic fellow at the Center for Vision & Values, and the author of over a dozen books, including A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism, and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
Photo “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
A disagreement I have with this article is the use of the term “voting booth”. Like the 2020 election, the 2024 election will not be determined in a “voting booth” or on “election day”. It will be determined by mail-in ballots, both in the primary and in the general election and America will most likely have a second Biden term or an only a slightly better option of a second Trump term. Such is “Democracy”.