Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t declared a winner in this week’s GOP presidential debate, but he does know who the loser is: The American people.
The Kennedy family scion and Democrat challenger to President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party presidential nomination blasted the eight Republican candidates who took the stage in Milwaukee as out of touch with the average American.
And just as Fox News debate moderators used previously unknown Country musician Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” to set the tone of Wednesday’s debate, RFK Jr. co-opted the surprise No. 1 hit to throw shade on the eight GOP combatants on stage.
The Republican debate was “out of sync with the mood of the country,” said the son of the late New York U.S. Senator Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 on the presidential campaign trail. Bobby Kennedy followed in the tragic footprints of his brother, Democrat President John F. Kennedy, who was shot and killed in Dallas five years earlier.
“Now that is an extraordinary song — raw, yet intelligent; defiant, yet compassionate. It’s about working-class hardship. It is about low wages (‘b******it pay’). It’s about degraded food supply, elite corruption, obesity, homelessness, despair,” RFK Jr. said.
“The candidates could have talked about these things. But they said nothing about the desperation and hardship working people face in this country. They said nothing about wages, housing costs, food costs, child care costs, and medical costs, or what we can do about it. They said nothing about the systemic corruption that enriches corporations and the elites as swaths of the former middle class fall into poverty,” he added.
That’s not quite true.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a top-tier GOP presidential candidate, hammered home the pains of the average American laboring under “Bidenomics” in the opening of the debate.
“Our country is in decline. This decline is not inevitable, it’s a choice,” DeSantis said. “We need to send Joe Biden back to his basement and reverse American decline.”
“We cannot succeed as a country if you are working hard and you can’t afford groceries, a car, or a new home while Hunter Biden can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on lousy paintings. That is wrong. We also cannot succeed when the Congress spends trillions and trillions of dollars. Those rich men north of Richmond have put us in this situation,” DeSantis said.
His Republican opponents touched on the inflationary pressures hitting every home, too. The debate itself lacked a thorough dive into the state of the economy, with the moderators instead focusing more on the multiple indictments of GOP nominee front-runner and former President Donald Trump, abortion, the war in Ukraine, and other hot-button topics.
RFK Jr. is absolutely correct in saying that the economy, more so the personal economy, is by far the No. 1 concern of the American voter. And an overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the U.S. economy, according to a recent Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That survey found a little more than a third (36 percent) of Americans think Biden is doing a good job when it comes to the economy, lower than his overall job approval rating (42 percent).
Biden’s basement approval ratings on the economy are in no small part why Kennedy Jr. is becoming more of a threat than just an irritant to the octogenarian incumbent.
While Biden holds a significant lead over his nearest challenger, RFK Jr. was supported by 17 percent of Democratic voters in the latest Fox News poll.
Kennedy Jr., a liberal Democrat who has earned support from some conservatives for his vehement criticism of the COVID vaccines and government lockdowns, has roundly attacked Biden. Post-debate, however, he had plenty of hard words for the Republican candidates on the stage. He ridiculed them for recycling “Reagan-era cliches about cutting spending, being ‘tough’ on drugs, crime, China, etc., and ending abortion.”
“They were obsessed with ‘America’s adversaries’ — but blind to how our policies have been deliberately constructed to CREATE adversaries and enrich the defense industry while bankrupting the nation,” RFK Jr. said in the press release.
He criticized the GOP presidential nomination seekers for a policy issue they share common ground on: border security. While he said he agrees with closing the border, he said the GOP candidates have no proposals to expand legal immigration to address the conditions that drive migration.
The Democratic presidential candidate has had plenty to say on Biden’s porous border policies, particularly on how the president’s war on the wall not only stopped construction of Trump’s southwest border block but defunded the basic border security instruments agents need to effectively do their jobs.
“Administration policy has transformed the role of border patrol agents into that of travel agents, who merely facilitate the safe transport of undocumented migrants from the border to communities in the U.S. interior,” Chris Clem is a former chief patrol agent with the United States Border Patrol, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill.
Kennedy Jr., following a visit earlier this year to Yuma, said, “The open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion-dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels.”
His liberal bonafides showed in his criticism of the Republican candidates “obsess[ing] about cutting spending (except defense — they want MORE of that) but offer no innovative proposals to address the decay of our infrastructure, wages, and environment.”
“Our nation deserves better than posturing and bickering masquerading as debate. Instead of arguing, we can tap into the swelling popular will to turn this country around,” the Democrat candidate said, pointing back to the presumed zeitgeist of “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
“Oliver Anthony has tapped into something that can unify our nation. Nearly everyone wants to reverse our decline, to end the corruption, to rebuild from the inside. Let’s talk about how to do that,” said the controversial Kennedy, who has faced his share of censorship over the past few years.
“Rich Men North of Richmond Lyrics” and video.
I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for b******it pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away
It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is
Livin’ in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down
Lord, it’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is
Livin’ in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond
I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for b******it pay
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Robert Kennedy Jr.” by Felton Davis. CC BY 2.0.
