Joe Biden is a walking dead man, politically. His approval ratings are in the tank, and a stunning 72 percent of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track,” according to a recent survey. Biden’s cognitive decline is embarrassingly obvious. He is already 80 years old — the oldest president the country has ever had. He would be 86 at the end of a second term, assuming he lived that long, which troubles even his supporters.
On top of all of this, he is surrounded by the stench of corruption: House Republican investigators say they have evidence that Biden and his family received $10 million (possibly many millions more) through complicated financial back channels from Ukrainian, Chinese, and Romanian sources. Moreover, the evidence comes not only from Hunter Biden’s laptop and from the testimony of Hunter’s business associates, but from suspicious activity reports that banks filed with the Treasury.
Add to that the testimony of credible IRS whistleblowers claiming Hunter got break after break from the Justice Department officials who were supposed to be investigating him, that his plea bargain with them was a sweetheart deal, and that he made off with millions in unpaid taxes — now not collectible.
And don’t forget about the pouch of cocaine found in Biden’s White House (which the president laughs off) or his seventh grandchild (whom he doesn’t acknowledge).
It’s not a good look for a president up for reelection — especially one whom shameless legacy media shelter from hard questioning. What if they turned on him?
Biden has become more of a liability than an asset. In such circumstances, a political party would normally search for a different presidential candidate. The Democrats could focus attention on, let’s say, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. And if the will were there, it would not be unduly hard to ease Biden out of the Oval Office. A delegation of top Democrat leaders could have a private conversation with him, thank him for his service in defeating Donald Trump, and tell him it is time to go. Or The New York Times and The Washington Post could begin publicizing Biden scandals instead of chloroforming the stories.
Even if all that failed, the Democrats could ask their deep-state enforcers in the FBI and CIA to pay him a visit, show him a dossier of the nasty secrets they have on him and his family, and threaten to spill them all if he does not vanish from the scene.
But the Democrats are not a normal party, and they simply can’t ditch Biden — not even if running Biden again carries the risk that a third-party candidate might emerge, or that Donald Trump might be elected again.
Why is this? One piece of the answer is that if Biden were dropped, the heiress-apparent would be his vice president: Kamala Harris. If nothing else is obvious in American politics, the fact that Harris is not a good politician is beyond clear. However, throwing her under the bus would be awkward and nasty because she represents the triumph of intersectionality — the core Democrat ideological position.
The main reason why the Democrats can’t ditch Biden, however, is that it would open up the nomination to primaries and public debate. And in those primaries, Newsom and Harris would not be the only contenders. They’d be joined by Robert Kennedy Jr., the 69-year-old lawyer son of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated while campaigning for the Democrat nomination in 1968, and the nephew of former Democrat President John F. Kennedy.
The Kennedy name is a unique asset. It carries an unequaled mystique in American politics: Neither the Bush nor the would-be Clinton dynasties can touch it. To this day, millions of Americans, especially older Democrats, look back with nostalgia at the Camelot years of JFK. Though one or two bizarro left-wing commentators have said that RFK is not a true Democrat, polls reported that RFK Jr. commanded a significant percentage of the Democratic Party vote right out of the box.
After weeks of shellacking (as a “conspiracy” theorist) by the lapdog press, he’s still around 14-15 percent — with high favorability ratings as well. He might run unopposed in the Democrats’ New Hampshire primary, where Biden seems afraid to take him on. If he beats Biden in New Hampshire, there is no saying where he might go next. (For example, some readers will remember that in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, Sen. Eugene McCarthy beat the unpopular incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson — paving the way for RFK Jr.’s father to challenge LBJ and force him out of the race.)
Why should this be a problem for the Democratic Party establishment? RFK Jr. avows sympathy for populism, says he welcomes the good words that Donald Trump has for him, and favors gun rights. However, he’s not a Republican or even much of a social conservative — he’s somewhat pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action. He’s also a convinced environmentalist and is in favor of regulating business.
But he parts company decisively with the current Democratic Party as it has evolved since Barack Obama left office. And therein lies the rub.
Kennedy is a Democrat, but an old-school Democrat — the kind of politician Joe Biden used to hold himself out to be but isn’t anymore. RFK Jr. talks about issues that really matter to middle- and working-class Americans, most of whom are being left in the dust under Biden’s economy. These are people who worry about how to afford basic housing, pay their car loans, meet next month’s credit card bills, or, increasingly, even find food.
When the corporate media aren’t trying to distract attention from Kennedy’s major themes by turning the conversation to vaccine mandates or “who killed JFK,” he talks about the dangers that Big Pharma poses to our political system, how the defense industry keeps us in perpetual war, and why polluters can manipulate the environmental bureaucrats who are supposed to be regulating them. He also calls for more vigorous antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate censorship.
What’s more, he breaks ranks with both parties by calling for a serious debate over Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine and excoriates Biden’s decision to supply cluster bombs to Ukraine (for uses that the Biden administration used to consider war crimes). And — uniquely in our politics — he denounces, in express terms, the oligarchs and plutocrats who are the real governing class in this nation.
This is the only presidential candidate you will hear saying, “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening … to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”
Even Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism revolves around this anti-corporatism. Kennedy opposes a law, passed in the late 1980s, that absolved vaccine makers from the threat of lawsuits.
All this makes him completely unacceptable to the corporatist, elite-managed Democratic Party forged by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — the one for which Joe Biden now carries water.
So expect establishment Democrats to rally around Biden. Bad as he is, at least he fends off the risk of open primaries that might demonstrate the appeal that RFK Jr.’s ideas have for millions of ordinary folks in their party — moderate voters who aren’t woke, obsessed with the transgender craze and mutilating surgery for children, or convinced that unrestricted abortion is sacramental.
And expect the leftist media to be both vicious and relentless in trying to marginalize Kennedy. Watch how they will do everything in their power to suppress his ideas about oligarchic power, economic injustice, and the sway of the corporate-feudalist state.
