Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/18/a-dozen-kennedys-show-up-at-rally-to-endorse-not-their-own-rfk-jr-but-president-biden-video.html
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Has anyone asked RFK Jr.'s kids if they support him for President? There are six in all so statistically at least one of them ought to like him, but he divorced both of the women who he had kids with so maybe not.
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Sorry bud, kinda looks like almost all of your family, a majority at least. To be fair some of your family haven’t openly endorsed a rival candidate, so you’ve got that going for you…
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Isn’t his daughter-in-law his campaign manager? I presume that this means that at least one son is supporting his candidacy, although maybe not and this just means RFK jr’s Thanksgiving is really that awkward.
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On the one hand, I hope that this helps; but on the other it feels uncomfortably like an aspect of the (common) tendency to overemphasize emotionally salient but questionably relevant personality factors in politics at a scale where the people you are voting for are basically policy packages(exactly what is in the package is likely to stem at least in part from personality factors; but this isn’t a small town mayoral race or a school board thing where you might actually be able to engage with the personality personally; your only relationship with an even vaguely plausible presidential candidate is going to be parasocial).
It wouldn’t make RFK any more palateable as a candidate if (whether through complementary dysfunction running in the family or through some sort of exceptional magnetism in person) his whole family wuved him and was eager to sing his praises; and, in the case of a candidate whose positions you might actually want, having some family on the other side of an ugly spat and eager to talk about it wouldn’t necessarily be of much note.
If you were dealing with someone who had no stated positions, no legislative history, nothing; you could certainly do worse than use what their own family is willing to say about them in public as a proxy; but you don’t generally get pure men of mystery as presidential candidates; nor have any obvious reason to consider voting for them vs. better-known quantities.
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Really tho?
RFK Jr’s policies, if we want to dignify them with the term, are almost beside the point. He’s a conservative-funded attempt to use a Democratic brand to spoil Biden’s chances. He’s riding mainly on his family name and this is an effective counter to that.
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He’s not doing everything 100% to anyone on the left’s liking and there are some big opportunities.
For all I’ve seen, Biden’s been more progressive than the last few D presidents. His work has brought a lot of people up.
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Given how few presidents have been remotely progressive, then yeah, I think that’s true… he’s been much more in the mold of LBJ or FDR than any other president since either of them. I agree with @belovedvillain that it’s not progressive enough, but he’s been doing some good shit on the domestic front without a doubt, even if it’s not quite enough.
Yeah, both Clinton and Obama were far more centrist. Carter… hmmmm… closer, but Biden is much more like the pre-watergate Democrats, frankly.
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Is it.too late.to get Obama back?
Just asking for a friend.
I mean, we could, but as a president, he really wasn’t that progressive. I’d say that Biden is far more progressive a president than Obama… 
Obama was objectively cooler, though…
But I kind of miss him, too.
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I think a lot about the massive complexity and unfortunate fragility that Biden inherited after the disaster years. He’s done a hell of a job all things considered.
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He has. He could have done a bit more when he had both houses, but I’m not unhappy with him. And of course, he had thin majorities, and then SCOTUS wasn’t always helpful…
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One of Obama’s most unforgivable mistakes was nominating so few judges. Biden learned from that.
That’s 150 as of last November, 63 of whom are women with color, 74 were public defenders/civil rights lawyers/somehow else “dedicated a significant portion of their careers to protecting people’s civil and human rights”.
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Well, was that all on him? You can only nominate for what’s vacant, and you can only get judges on the bench if the senate cooperates. And he had a large period when the senate under McConnell did not do that, including with a SC justice.
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It wasn’t all on him but the articles I was reading in real time e.g.
put a lot on him. These are two of many relevant quotes from the article above:
There are now [Dec 2012] more than 100 vacancies on the federal bench, out of some 856 federal district and appellate judges, far more than on the day Obama took office. … During Obama’s first term, total judicial vacancies increased by 51 percent. During the first terms of Clinton and Bush, they declined by 65 and 34 percent respectively.
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I’ll check it out in a bit, because I’m not sure if I think that’s a fair argument? So, I want to see what evidence they bring up and how they frame it.
thanks!
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