In case you had been questioning what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s marketing campaign is actually all about—effectively, you possibly can cease questioning. In a exceptional new video, Rita Palma, who claims she’s the New York state director for the Kennedy marketing campaign (the Kennedy marketing campaign claims in any other case), just lately stated a lot of quiet elements out loud, basically claiming that the most effective motive for voting for the Kool-Support-besotted Children’ Desk Kennedy is to elect Donald Trump. As a result of that’s what each disaffected Democrat ought to need, proper?
As February’s pro-Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tremendous Bowl advert confirmed, the candidate’s boosters are relying on poaching low-information Democratic voters who’re nostalgic for the halcyon days of Camelot. And polio, after all. Can’t overlook polio. Certainly, in the event you compile an inventory of our best Democratic presidents, you’ll discover one was a Kennedy and one other grew to become disabled as a result of there was no polio vaccine but. These had been the times, proper? And now we are able to have the most effective of each worlds!
So hearth up the RCA, mild up an unfiltered Pall Mall, pop open a family-sized bag of asbestos, and lie again in your spankin’-new La-Z-Boy for the world premiere of “Gunsmoke.” We’re gonna make the Democratic Get together nice once more—by hobbling an incumbent, anti-preventable-disease, precise Democrat who presides over an economic system that’s at present the envy of the world.
Watch:
RITA PALMA: “So there’s no Biden voters in the home, proper? No. Okay, good. [Laughter] Issues, I suppose, will change over time since you do must solely choose one candidate on the finish of the day. However the Kennedy voter and the Trump voter … our mutual enemy is Biden. Since Biden is relying on us, with Bobby within the combine, my thought is for the Republicans … See, Bobby proper now, he’s pulling from either side. Proper now he’s truly pulling somewhat bit extra from Biden, which explains why the DNC is sort of ganging up on him. They’ve a particular committee to go after unbiased candidates. After they say unbiased candidates, like nonaffiliated candidates, they actually imply Bobby, as a result of Bobby’s the one third social gathering [candidate] that anyone’s taking critically.
“So that they developed a committee simply to go after him and to get him off of the poll in any means that they will. Particularly, it appears as if they’re going after the battleground states greater than the deep-blue states. Bobby’s transferring the blues on his personal. If the Republicans accepted the truth that New York, Maryland, Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, a lot of the Northeast goes to go blue, why wouldn’t we put our vote to Bobby and no less than do away with Biden and get these 28 electoral votes in New York … give these 28 electoral votes to Bobby quite than to Biden, thereby decreasing Biden’s 270? And everyone knows how that works, proper? 270 wins the election. If no one will get to 270, then Congress picks the president. So who’re they going to select, who’re they going to select if it’s a Republican Congress? They’ll choose Trump. So we’re rid of Biden both means. Does everyone observe that? Okay.”
Yeah, we observe that. Aside from the half the place you need a man who doesn’t imagine in democracy to be the president of the USA. That one’s sort of a head-scratcher.
Or perhaps not, given Palma’s historical past. Based on Politico, Palma voted for Trump twice, and he or she appears much more wanting to get him over the hump this cycle.
“I’m going to vote for Bobby, nonetheless, if I get up on Nov. 6 and Trump wins, I’m not going to be overly upset,” she continued in a video of the presentation seen by POLITICO. “But when Biden wins, we’re all going to be terribly upset.”
Palma, who’s an area anti-vaccine mandate activist, believes convincing Republicans to tactically vote for Kennedy, who’s working as an unbiased, is “a very good technique” and will drive a contingent election in November.
So to make clear, right here’s what this vax-hating MAGA ghoul is on about. Kennedy is on the poll in Utah, and solely Utah as of this writing (he’d presumably collected sufficient signatures to get on the poll in Nevada, too, however he fucked up the process). However Palma is making an attempt to get him on New York’s poll, and her plan is to be sufficient of a spoiler in a number of key blue states to stop Biden from reaching 270 electoral votes—the brink for profitable the presidency.
And if nobody reaches 270—as a result of, say, New York swings to Kennedy as an alternative of staying in Biden’s column—the election might be thrown to the Home of Representatives. But it surely wouldn’t be a straight up-and-down vote of Home members. As an alternative, every state’s delegation would get a vote—on this situation, California’s 39 million residents would have the identical say as Wyoming’s 581,000—and if that occurs, Trump might simply be elected, even when he loses each the favored and electoral votes.
In case that sounds acquainted, it’s the identical technique the No Disgrace No Labels Get together briefly eyed earlier than Joe Lieberman popped his clogs and was heartily welcomed into heaven by all of the People who preceded him as a result of the ACA had no public choice.
The concept Kennedy may draw back sufficient historically Democratic votes from Biden to win New York is every kind of absurd. However he definitely might make hassle in swing states, the place his title recognition might sway a decisive variety of low- and no-information voters.
That’s a menace the Democratic Get together is at present taking lethal critically. And although Palma’s New York technique appears doomed from the outset, her open hostility towards Biden makes it abundantly clear that RFK Jr.’s marketing campaign has no qualms about performing as a pro-Trump spoiler.
NBC Information:
There are model new tremendous PACs — plural — dedicated to crushing third-party candidates. Democratic Nationwide Committee cellular billboards troll Kennedy at occasions. And social gathering donors are funding authorized efforts to attempt to preserve him off the poll.
[…]
Democrats have grown more and more alarmed by Kennedy’s energy in polls, particularly since he named Silicon Valley philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his working mate. Not solely might she fund the cash-strapped marketing campaign, however her choice and the best way the marketing campaign launched her signaled that Kennedy is positioning himself extra on the left within the 2024 marketing campaign.
Shanahan, who till just lately was a sizable Democratic donor, introduced on stage that she was leaving the Democratic Get together and invited others to hitch her.
However wait! As a result of Kennedy is so unapologetically pro-pestilence, he may additionally enchantment to MAGA-sympathetic voters who’d choose a president who can unfold illness by wielding his highly effective veto pen quite than simply sharing his jail bathe sandals. So a threatened Trumpworld has been lining as much as bash him as effectively.
The Bulwark:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s beliefs and campaign-trail rhetoric have a lot enchantment to MAGA voters that Donald Trump and his prime political supporters are beginning to take steps to make sure that the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate doesn’t stray too far into the Republican’s lane.
[…]
“A 12 months in the past, everybody thought Kennedy was a very good factor. Not everybody thinks it’s a good suggestion now,” stated one Republican who has suggested Trump. This adviser in contrast Kennedy to democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom RFK Jr. has stated he admires. “The problem in the present day with Kennedy is he’s interesting to the ‘go-fuck-the-world’ voter, which is a portion of the Trump coalition. And that’s the problem. The Kennedy base of help remains to be nearer to a Bernie-type voter, however Trump received a few of them in 2016.”
[…]
“For greater than two years, Kennedy was on extra conservative media than any of the Republicans who ran for president, so he’s partly a monster of our personal making,” stated one adviser in Trump’s orbit. “However the identical conservative media equipment that constructed him up is beginning to tear him down. It’s simple. He’s a liberal.”
After all, whereas the “go-fuck-the-world” vote has presumably elevated since Trump’s clammy corpus disgorged onto the political scene practically 9 years in the past, it’s nonetheless a minority of the voters. And so it’s as much as us to push RFK Jr. into that little Trumpian nook of the world the place he naturally suits. As a result of his circle of relatives’s Least Favourite Kennedy™ is nothing like an actual Democrat as of late. He’s only a gormless goober who can’t resolve from one second to the subsequent what he and his marketing campaign stand for.
He backpedals greater than Trump from a Latinx course of server, and the current Palma debacle is not any exception. In what’s changing into a transparent and constant sample, the marketing campaign shortly walked again Palma’s assertion, basically consigning her from New York state director to espresso woman standing.
“Rita Palma is a poll entry marketing consultant answerable for scheduling volunteer shifts for our upcoming signature assortment drive within the Empire State. She shouldn’t be concerned in electoral technique, nationally or in New York,” RFK Jr. marketing campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear stated in response to the Palma video.
“This was not a marketing campaign occasion,” Spear continued. “Palma was talking as a personal citizen and her statements by no means mirror the technique of the Kennedy marketing campaign, which is to win the White Home with votes from former Trump and Biden supporters alike.”
Okay, positive. RFK Jr. isn’t working to assist Trump. He actually thinks he’ll win! And he is aware of this can be his final likelihood earlier than the majority of his supporters die of smallpox. However even somebody as benighted as Kennedy certainly is aware of he might even be greasing the skids for the approaching Thousand-12 months Trumpian Reich.
However hey, so long as true-blue Democrat Joe Biden doesn’t win, that’s all that basically issues, proper?
Try Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, together with the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this hyperlink.
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