My Dinner With Bobby
My Dinner With Bobby
He responded to my localist maunderings with genuine insight.
I am not in the habit of dispensing advice to political candidates, but that’s okay, because they are not in the habit of soliciting my wisdom. The last counsel I recall tendering was to a friend who was running for county coroner. I gave her a slogan—“No premature burials!”—that she declined to use. She lost.
But when an old buddy invited me to Palm Beach for an off-the-record dinner with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a dozen of his major financial backers, what could I say?
We supped in April, one week after RFK Jr. had named Nicole Shanahan, philanthropic ex-wife of Google’s cofounder, as his running mate.
Had America a functioning press, the story would have been not the past amours of Ms. Shanahan but the fact that anti-competitive ballot access laws make it prohibitively expensive for any independent candidate or insurgent party to challenge the duopoly without adding a sugar daddy (or mama) to the ticket. Kennedy was following the example of 1980 Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark, who funded his energetic campaign by putting David Koch on his jugate.
Shanahan’s Silicon Valley pedigree ought to have provided an opening for Mr. Kennedy to extend a critique made by the patriot Ralph Nader, the only presidential candidate I have ever heard inveigh against family-assaulting screens. In Ralph’s case the target was television, whose insidious idiocies he saw as undermining parental authority; the greater danger today is from smartphones, social media, and other technologies that dumb down discourse, corrupt our communities, erode our humanity, and zombify our people—all with munificent subsidies from public schools and other state entities. (It ain’t the invisible hand that is strangling us.)
My impression is that the tripartite Kennedy ’24 universe comprises leftish environmentalists, libertarian-inclined populists, and alternative-medicine types. Previous efforts at building a left-right coalition have foundered in the turbulent seas of cultural and sexual politics. But there is a solvent that can, or should, dissolve these conflicts: federalism, the original American idea. Abortion, drug laws, which bathroom a person should use: the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights says that such matters must be decided at the state or local level. Let San Francisco be San Francisco, and let Utah be Utah. We need two, ten, many Dobbses. Nationalists won’t like it, but tough luck.
The defense of our communities against soul-stealers and grim centralizers is a matter that transcends left and right. So, too, is peace.
Normal Americans are bored senseless when treated to a discourse on the relative demerits of foreign politicians and movements. What they care about, and what our elite class never deigns to acknowledge, is the domestic cost of war: lives lost, lives disrupted, families sundered, courtships interrupted, community enterprises (churches, volunteer fire departments) deprived of essential members—and of course the billions of taxpayer dollars shipped overseas to be expended in killing people we have never met and who have never threatened our country.
To affirm today the classic Middle American position that the U.S. should refrain from involvement in foreign wars is to be called a Putin-lover by Democrats and a Hamas-lover by Republicans. ’Twas ever thus: just ask Martin Luther King Jr., Fighting Bob La Follette, Ron Paul, and every other peacemaker in American history who has been accused of siding with the enemy because he or she rejected war. (RFK Jr. is a Gaza hawk, but then his father was assassinated by a Palestinian…)
Strikingly, in our three-and-a-half-hour dinner, Kennedy may have mentioned Covid-19 once but he never spoke of vaccines.
I took the first jab and don’t regret it, but I do find it remarkable that the Covid shutdowns are treated by the opining class as ancient history, no more relevant to the 2024 election than the Tariff Act of 1883. The lawgivers closed coffee shops, houses of God, bars, high-school sporting events, even family gatherings—the things that give our lives heft and meaning—while Netflix, Amazon, Google, Walmart, and other cankers upon American society suppurated profits. (In New York State, RFK Jr.’s scumbag ex-brother-in-law, Andrew Cuomo, was the villain-in-chief.) Yet like the architects and mouthpieces of the Iraq War, the bastards who destroyed the livelihoods of working people and small-business owners paid no discernable price, at least in this life.
I suppose I’ll cast my futile and inutile vote this November for Kennedy, who responded to my localist maunderings with genuine insight. Trump has guts and a good veep, but anyone who assembles John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley as his America First foreign-policy team has blown his chance.
Cheers to all—Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, Peter Sonski, Cornel West—who defy a two-party system that presided at the interment of the republic. I’m still opposed to premature burials.
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