BREAKING FRIDAY NIGHT NEWS WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
Appetizer:
Main course essential viewing: Michelle Obama on stage with Bruce Springsteen for “Glory Days” in Barcelona:
Dessert:
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ALSO, Burt and Barbra, watch this one too:
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I’m quite interested in the two #2s.
I was planning to predict any day now that we would soon see reputable polls showing Donald Trump with a bigger lead over Ron DeSantis than Joe Biden has over Bobby Kennedy.
Too late.
Maybe you all, like me, failed to notice right away, but it’s already happened:
Trump +46
Biden +43
And, in the current moment, there are good reasons to think that RFK could rise even more, while DeSantis might not have hit his floor yet.
Kennedy’s chances of catching on are more challenging because he appears to be virtually blacklisted by the media, while DeSantis gets covered every day.
The gatekeepers at the Dominant Media largely do not want to elevate Bobby, since they are all anti-anti-vax and they don’t want to do anything that might weaken Biden (and thus help to elect Trump).
But you need to pay attention to Kennedy’s message, a beautiful mosaic of passion, combining notes and themes from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and some of the blue collar/fighting for you of it all of Scranton Joe.
I’m not over predicting here, but if Kennedy can get his message out I think he could cause much bigger problems for the incumbent than currently thought in most quarters. If he becomes the protest candidate repository for the giant pool of Democratic primary voters who are unenthused about Biden-Harris, watch out.
The media likes to retreat behind the caveat of “well, RFK can’t beat Biden for the nomination….so who cares?” but that ignores the many ways in which the Camelot Kid can inflict a lot of damage and create a lot of complexity on/for the president and his party.
To paint just one of many scenarios that have wafted through my head in the last day: What if Kennedy finishes a decent second in the early contests, accumulating delegates, and then Biden is unable to continue in the race for health reasons? Who becomes the nominee at that point?
Kennedy is without a doubt a flawed messenger -- but his message fits the times we are in now really well for tens of millions of voters.
Two of the smartest political observers we are lucky enough to have use their Substacks in essential reading pieces to explore and explain the appeal of Bobby Kennedy (they both also muse about Tucker ’24).
Here is the brilliant Mr. John Ellis whose newsletter you should subscribe to, on RFK:
The fact that he won’t be the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee does not mean he won’t have a significant impact on the 2024 presidential campaign. Ask Lyndon Johnson if Sen. Gene McCarthy had any chance of being the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968. Ask George H.W. Bush if Pat Buchanan had any chance of being the Republican presidential nominee in 1992. Neither McCarthy nor Buchanan had a realistic chance of being their respective parties’ nominees. Both men had a measurable impact on the outcome of the general elections in 1968 and 1992.
McCarthy and Buchanan were “messengers.” The “establishment” reaction to their candidacies was “shoot the messenger.” But they persisted, and subsisted, because they gave voice to discontent. That’s what some candidates become, sometimes. They become vehicles of discontent.
As a vehicle of discontent, you could do worse than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The name still resonates. He has a tagline that only he can use: “I think we can do better.” And he has a persuasive Kennedy-esque message — “it’s time for a new generation of leadership”— even if that message doesn’t apply to him specifically. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that America is desperate for a new generation of leadership.
Kennedy has other things going for him aside from his family’s political “brand.” He only has to focus on one state: New Hampshire. And he need only deliver one message. That message is: “you deserve a choice.”
And Andrew Sullivan:
Kennedy sees clearly how the Dems have become the party of big corporations, HR authoritarians, and the mega-wealthy. Carlson sees the totalitarian essence of wokeness, its denial of core American values, and the cynical distraction of critical theory madness when most middle-class Americans are overwhelmed, overworked, and dying prematurely in large numbers. Neither is easily intimidated. Kennedy also feels in his bones the spiritual desolation out there, and grasps our duty to balance prosperity with care for the planet….
Bobby is now 69 years old, but seems much younger. Fun disclosure: I’ve known him personally through my old friend and his brother, Max, and always found him straightforward and disarming — if deeply troubled. This week, as I watched his campaign speech, and absorbed a long but riveting interview by David Samuels in Tablet, I was rustled out of my assumption that he’d simply gone nuts (as others in his family believe). Here is how Samuels frames the candidacy of “one of the most effective environmental activists in the country”:
[T]he case Kennedy made in his [2005 anti-vax article “Deadly Immunity”] was no more or less plausible and empirically grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it. […] Now that conspiracy theories have gone mainstream, who better than RFK Jr. to authentically understand and communicate with a public that is rightly suspicious of the poisons in its water and air, the dishonesty of the public health bureaucracy, and the toxic nature of official discourse.
Kennedy is coherent, has an insane grasp of detail, and can speak extemporaneously with a skill not seen since Obama. He’s also broken — by tragedy, addiction, loss, and failure. (You can almost hear it in his cracked voice, caused by a rare disorder.) His father and uncle were murdered, his brother died of an overdose, he spent time hooked on heroin, and his ex-wife, Mary, hanged herself. But brokenness has its strengths in a leader, especially if you want to revive Americans’ faith in themselves and in their future. Imagine a president able to truly get the opioid crisis — because he remains in recovery. We are in some ways a broken country. And we will not heal by repeating the 2016 and 2020 presidential cycles.
At this point, if RFK plays his cards right, I would be surprised if he doesn’t get to the mid-30s or higher in some polls. At which point, as I’ve written, watch New Hampshire, debate invitations, and online fundraising.
There are links in both the Ellis and Sullivan pieces you should make time for, including to the long RFK announcement event video, which I am still recommending you watch.
As Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign success demonstrated, particularly in 2016, when the Establishment circles the wagons on behalf of the Establishment’s favored candidate, it can cause significant backlash. Kennedy’s message and posture, like Bernie’s, are tailor made for that jujitsu. And for a lot of voters not excited about four more years….
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As for the GOP’s #2, the current news cycle is not his best triumph. It is bad news/good news testament to how far DeSantis has fallen in the eyes of the Gang of 500 that the stories and storylines I am about to run through are not front and center in your newsfeed.
In other words “DeSantis Running a Crappy Campaign for President” is now a dog-bites-man story. Seen it, been there, done that.
There are many ways to describe how the Sunshine State topper has lost control of his public image (some because of Team Trump and some by seppuku), but here’s one: He is now out-Trumping Trump, displaying more of the unattractive traits of the Master of Mar-a-Lago than the former president himself – the very traits, ironically, that led many in the party to search for (and anoint DeSantis as…) the Trump alternative.
With his abortion, Ukraine, and Disney gambits, DeSantis is now outflanking Trump as the Chaos Candidate, the vindictive, undisciplined, bullheaded egomaniac who is taking positions that will alienate suburban and female voters to the point that they render him unelectable in the general.
Consider these clips:
1. NBC News with the conventional wisdom overview (emphasis added):
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis prepares to jump into the presidential race, a growing number of supporters say he is sorely in need of a change in strategy if he’s to have any chance of defeating Donald Trump for the GOP nomination….
A person with knowledge of the DeSantis operations described struggles in mastering interpersonal skills, building up an operation and focusing on effective policy messages.“
ANY CHANCE”!! and the man isn’t even in the race yet!!
2. Matt Lewis with the obit of the AA player who can’t hit a Major League curve ball:
Sure, it’s theoretically possible that DeSantis could improve on the trail. But his performance over these last couple of weeks reminds me that he was a fairly average pol before Trump ever came down that escalator.
And it’s likely to get worse. While DeSantis fends off Trump’s attacks (including his argument that under DeSantis, Florida isn’t all that great), he will also face scrutiny from national media and be forced to defend policies he has piloted in Florida. These include policies around LGBTQ and trans people, and other culture war-slanted issues (including books being taken out of classrooms and wanting to change laws that protect journalists) that he cleaved to outflank Trump on the right.
All this to say, he will be fighting a two-front war. And he will have to do much of it on someone else’s turf (in places like Davenport, Iowa, or Manchester, New Hampshire).
Can he rise to the occasion? These last few weeks, he seems smaller. He seems less confident. He seems out of his league.
3. The Jewish Insider says that many members of the Republican Jewish donor community who were betting on DeSantis are now either resigned to Trump being the nominee or are looking for another Third Man or Woman.
4. Politico says Team DeSantis is now using media and messaging to take on Nikki Haley (whose operation has been going after DeSantis). Leaving aside all the reasons that political pros would be skeptical of such an effort working at this point, the symbolism of punching down at a moment of weakness, when the Gang is looking to see if DeSantis has what it takes to overcome Trump, is not great.
When a presidential candidate (even an undeclared one) is in the barrel for a sustained period, recovery requires introspection, humility and the capacity to change, even if the immediate peril is not caused by fundamental flaws. Raise your hand if you’ve detected any of those three traits in Ron DeSantis.
And I will say again: Don’t underestimate the extent that Trump himself and his experienced posse is never going to let up on DeSantis. Mar-a-Lago has played fifty+ cards a day for weeks now to smite the governor – and/but they are holding a lot more cards to play.
We don’t know what DeSantis’ polling floor is in the horserace. “We” had all thought Trump’s ceiling was, I don’t know, maybe 48%? He’s busted through that in several recent surveys.
If the only thing that changes about the DeSantis operation after he gets in the race is who is paying for his plane, there would seem to be a pretty good chance that the two bodies in motion (Trump’s poll numbers going up and DeSantis’ down) will remain in motion.
Which means: Look for change a’comin’….
To be continued…
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ESSENTIAL READING
* The New York Times updates on the various prongs of Jack Smith’s probe, including:
Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims….
[I]nvestigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.
Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.
* The Associated Press on the start of the Biden-Harris fundraising efforts, giving rise to the important question of how powerful a juggernaut will this team be in raising small-dollar donations digitally. The implications of success (or failure) are pretty significant.
* The Wall Street Journal got an interview with Justice Alito, which made enough news to dazzle Drudge:
“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” Alito said, according to the story published online Friday. He said he was sure the leak “was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside — as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”
Alito said the theory that the draft was leaked by someone on the right to lock in the five votes necessary to overturn Roe “is infuriating to me.”
“Look, this made us targets of assassination,” Alito told his interviewers. “Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.” (Washington Post)
* The New York Post on the seventh Biden grandchild – and a possible imminent court date for her dad:
First son Hunter Biden is roleplaying as a starving artist to duck his child support payments — when he’s actually “living lavishly” with access to $850-per-hour attorneys, according to a scathing court filing by the mother of his out-of-wedlock daughter.
Clinton Lancaster, an attorney for Lunden Roberts, ripped the 53-year-old Hunter in a 12-page discovery motion filed Thursday in Independence County, Ark., where the scandal-scarred first son has been ordered to appear next week to explain his request to reduce the support he provides Luden and their daughter, Navy Joan.
“Mr. Biden claims to be nothing more than a Yale educated attorney/artist who is somewhat financially destitute and needs his child support adjusted,” Lancaster wrote.
“However, for an artist living on meager means, Mr. Biden is living lavishly.”