There are a lot of kooks out there. And if you’re running for president, you’d better have a plan for appealing to them.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. certainly does. But when the newly declared candidate for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination tried to air his position on vaccines in an interview on ABC-TV last week, his remarks were edited out.
ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis gave this explanation: “We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including portions of that exchange in our interview.”
That meant a sizable number of the kooks in the electorate didn’t get to hear Kennedy’s kooky contention that COVID vaccines don’t work and his even kookier contention that childhood vaccines cause autism.
The story of ABC’s cutting out his remarks was met with disapproval on both the left and the right after it went viral on the internet. And there’s no vaccine for that sort of virus. ABC just helped it spread by calling more attention to it – and to his candidacy.
Kennedy is at the moment the only Democrat with significant name recognition who is willing to take on Joe Biden in next year’s presidential primaries.
The name recognition comes from having the same name as the man who was assassinated in the 1968 primary campaign, his father Robert F. Kennedy.
At the moment it looks like this campaign could end up being cut from the same template as that one.
Back in 1968, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was expected to easily win his party’s nomination for another term. But when it comes to false claims, he made plenty of them on the subject of the Vietnam War but no one edited them out. That included his statement that he wouldn’t send American boys to do what Asian boys could do for themselves.
When Johnson sent them anyway, he sparked an antiwar movement in his own party. Student protesters chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today?”
That wasn’t a good sign. But then as now, most Democratic politicians were afraid to stand up to an incumbent president from their own party.
Not Eugene McCarthy. He began a presidential campaign based on opposition to the war.
The Minnesota Senator barely registered in the polls going into the first primary. But when the polls in New Hampshire closed, he ended up with 42 percent of the vote.
That led Johnson to drop out of the race and RFK to jump in. But after he was shot, the party leaders picked a party hack who had backed the war. Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost the support of the antiwar movement and also the election, which Richard Nixon won.
There’s a lesson in that for both parties. Polls show that both ex-president Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden are among the weakest possible nominees for their party. The party that dumps its current front-runner first would gain a big advantage.
On the Republican side, Trump seems to be doing a good job of highlighting his own weaknesses.
On the Democratic side, RFK Jr. is well-positioned to reprise the role of McCarthy. He might not win the nomination, but he could open the door for someone who can.
A Fox News poll showed that Kennedy registered 19 percent support as soon as he announced.
That’s a healthy kickoff to his campaign. And he could gain a lot more support once the campaign gets going in earnest this summer. That Kennedy name can mean a lot, and no one knows that better than the South Jersey pol who is the only candidate ever to beat a Kennedy in a general election.
That’s U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew of Cape May County. In 2020, he defeated Amy Kennedy in the race for the southernmost Congressional seat in New Jersey.
Amy Kennedy is the wife of Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island. Van Drew recalls that it wasn’t easy running against a Kennedy.
“It was the money. It was the machine,” Van Drew told me. “The Democrats wanted to beat me so badly that it was like a No. 1 priority.”
The reason they wanted to beat him was that Van Drew had won election as a Democrat in 2018 before switching to Republican in 2020. But the district was switching to Republican as well, and Van Drew defeated Kennedy by five points.
This time around, Van Drew is not selling a Kennedy short. Someone’s going to mount a meaningful challenge to Biden, he predicted.
“This will be a testing ground to see if the Kennedys really have it anymore,” said Van Drew. “We got ‘em pretty good, but this will really show if the Kennedy mystique still has value.”
Well, RFK Jr. certainly has the kook vote locked up.
And in modern-day America, that puts him a long way on the path to victory.
More: Recent Paul Mulshine columns.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter @Mulshine. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook and on Twitter