WEST DES MOINES, Iowa —Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading national anti-vaccine voice, is launching a long-shot campaign for president and stirring the troubled Democratic Party waters in the Iowa caucuses.
A former Iowa congressman and long-time state Democratic Party leader told The Iowa Star the entry of a prominent Kennedy family scion into the race will prevent the national nominating process from turning into a coronation for President Joe Biden.
The newly minted presidential candidate, son of former U.S. attorney general and New York Senator Bobby Kennedy, assassinated during his 1968 run for president, and nephew to late President John F. Kennedy, joins longer-shot self-help author Marianne Williamson in challenging Biden.
Kennedy Jr.’s official filing with the Federal Election Commission comes nearly a month after the environmental attorney asked his Twitter followers to help him “decide whether to run for president.”
“If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms,” he wrote in the March 10 tweet.
Help me decide whether to run for President. Visit https://t.co/EX83yh9O4O to volunteer or contribute. If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race. If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt https://t.co/ujEHehub9T…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) March 10, 2023
The Biden army is already attacking Kennedy as an anti-vaxxer quack with little chance of beating an incumbent president in the race for the Democratic Party’s nominee. But Biden is anything but popular, even in his own party. According to a national Monmouth University poll released late last month, 44 percent of Democrats would prefer the 80-year-old not seek re-election. That’s an improvement from February, when just 37 percent of Democrats questioned in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll said they wanted Biden to run again.
It all makes things very interesting for the Democratic National Committee in Iowa. The DNC, in the pursuit of “diversity” and ‘inclusion,” has decided to end Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus status after 50 years and make South Carolina the first nominating state. The party’s presidential primary calendar bumps Iowa and New Hampshire to the back of the line, well after South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan.
The Republican National Committee is keeping Iowa and New Hampshire in the lead-off spot, with the Hawkeye State caucuses slated for early February and the New Hampshire primary shortly thereafter.
“Folks, the Democratic Party looks like America, and so does this proposal,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison said before the committee voted to boot mostly white Iowa from the starting line.
Officials from the Iowa Democratic Party did not return multiple requests for comment Thursday. But party officials have suggested they will go ahead with planning an unsanctioned caucus night. Legally, they have to. Iowa law demands the parties hold their caucuses before any other state’s presidential nominating vote. The consequences for not doing so aren’t clear.
The DNC is threatening to punish the rebels by taking away delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Let them, said Dave Nagle, a former three-term U.S. congressman representing Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District and former state party chair. Nagle has been fighting for 40 years to keep Iowa No. 1 in the presidential nominating process.
“Every indication I have is we’re going to go ahead and hold the caucuses,” he told The Star Thursday from his Waterloo law office.
Biden isn’t all that interested in coming back to campaign in Iowa, where he finished fourth in the state party’s caucuses in 2020. The DNC has fixed it so he really doesn’t have to be bothered with campaigning.
“What we have here, what the president of the United State is seeking to do is not to have a nominating process but a coronation. We have to stand in opposition to that,” Nagle said.
Nagle, who worked with Kennedy Jr.’s brother, former U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, in Congress, said he would be glad to show the presidential candidate around the state, an offer he has made to all hopefuls.
“His prospects for success are limited, but, hell, so was Jimmy Carter and Mike Huckabee.”
Carter, a peanut farmer and governor of Georgia in 1976, finished second in the Iowa caucuses, but the Democrat’s surprising finish catapulted him to top contender status. The rest is presidential history. In 2008, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee surprised the field of top Republicans, winning the Iowa caucuses. Huckabee’s Hawkeye win, however, did not translate into a White House victory.
Kennedy Jr.’s advocacy against the COVID-19 vaccines has cost the environmental activist a lot of enemies on the left but has gained him the respect of some conservatives.
As CBS News sneered, Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Donald Trump, “had been encouraging Kennedy to run for months, believing he could be both a useful chaos agent in the 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vaccine sentiment around the country…”
Kennedy Jr.’s 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” accused the nation’s former COVID czar of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”
During a visit to New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College last month, Kennedy Jr. told voters that his criticism of the powers that be caused him to be “deplatformed” on social media. Instagram declared Kennedy Jr. spread misinformation and barred him in 2021.
“We have probably the greatest polarization in our country’s history that we’ve ever had since the Civil War, really dangerous polarization,” he said during his speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.
Nagle said America needs a vetting of the presidential contenders through the tried-and-true retail politics that the Iowa caucuses — in the leadoff position — provide. Otherwise, the coronation of the parties’ anointed will go unchecked by the voter. He said the DNC has effectively closed off voters in states from “everything west of the Mississippi River to California.”
“If we step aside, we forfeit rural America’s place at the table,” the Democrat said, with a message to the national party. “So go ahead and punish us. It’s more important to be represented than rewarded.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Robert Kennedy Jr.” by Robert Kennedy Jr.
