It is standard fare for a politician to invoke family on the campaign trail. But it lands differently when the candidate is Robert F Kennedy Jr.
When he talks about “my father” — and how no one thought he had a chance to win his bid for the presidency — he is talking about the late Robert F Kennedy, the tragic hope of a younger generation in the 1968 election. When he mentions “my uncle” in discussing the need for negotiations with Russia, that would be the 35th US president who averted disaster during the Cuban missile crisis.
Kennedy summoned these ghosts repeatedly during a campaign stop on Sunday in Holbrook, a town smack in the middle of suburban Long Island. The venue was a capacious wedding hall, and he filled it with an overwhelmingly white and middle-aged crowd. They revelled in an independent campaign that gives off libertarian vibes and is draped in suspicion of corporations and Big Pharma but is also steeped in nostalgia.
“There’s people interested in him because it’s kind of like going to see Paul McCartney,” said Stephen Vella, 62, a retired police officer who now spends his days painting and writing poetry.
Kennedy has made it on to the ballot in two states, and claims enough signatures for another seven — even while most of his extended family has publicly backed President Joe Biden. One, Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, last year accused him of “trading in on Camelot” and dismissed his candidacy as “an embarrassment”. Their rejection has deepened the sense that the recovered heroin addict and avowed vaccine sceptic is zany and self-promoting.
Still, a likeable candidate blessed with a famous name and talent for campaigning appears to be stirring anguish in the camps of Biden and Donald Trump as an alternative who might catch fire and tilt the balance in a close race. Kennedy is polling at about 10 per cent nationally, according to an average of polls from FiveThirtyEight.
A sign of his relevance is that Trump, after talking up Kennedy early on, has taken to blasting him as a “radical Left liberal” and Democratic “plant” sent to spoil his chances. His pique may have been provoked by recent polling showing the independent candidate could draw more votes from him than from Biden.
During his Holbrook appearance, Kennedy attempted to tackle head-on the doubt that plagues all independent candidates in American politics: that a vote for them is a ballot wasted.
“The reason I’m behind . . . is because so many Americans are voting out of fear,” he said, dismissing Biden’s campaign, in particular, as resting on little more than a warning about the dangers of Trump. “My path to victory is to convince Americans to vote not out of fear.”
But for a few hot-button issues such as guns and abortion, the Democrats and Republicans were largely similar, Kennedy argued. He raised a host of issues plaguing America — chronic ill health, national debt, a “poisoned” food supply — that he said his opponents were not even discussing.
He pleaded for a more civil tone. If either Trump or Biden prevailed, he said, “half the country is going to be angry, and half the country is going to be smug”. Someone in the crowd responded with a cry to “make America gracious again!”. Someone else kept shouting: “Ivermectin!” — a reference to the horse dewormer that some used as an unapproved Covid therapy.
Meanwhile, Kennedy displayed some political skill in attempting to soften his reputation as an “anti-vaxxer”. “Whatever we’re doing — whatever we did — was wrong,” he said of America’s response to the pandemic, citing the nation’s enormous death toll. “Locking down the American public was wrong. Shutting down businesses was wrong.” The crowd roared its approval.
At 70, Kennedy, who lifts weights at Golds Gym in Venice Beach, California, is both a picture of extreme health and some frailty. He is tanned and muscled, like a surfer, with gleaming white teeth. Yet his voice has been reduced by a neurological condition to a grandfatherly rasp that is hardly ideal for the campaign trial.
Long before his scepticism of the Covid vaccine drew national attention, he was admired by many New Yorkers for championing environmental causes, including the clean-up of the Hudson River.
Some who trekked to Long Island on Sunday to listen to Kennedy expressed enthusiasm for alternative — often unapproved — medical treatments. Some shared conspiracy theories, including a man calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and another linking last year’s devastating Hawaii fire to the 9/11 attacks.
One sentiment that seemed widespread was anger at the plight of America’s middle class, and an oft-repeated dread among attendees that their own children might never be able to buy a home, as they had.
“I don’t want to hear the bullshit that the economy has never been better. Anybody who fills their tank or buys groceries knows that we were much better off four years ago,” said Sonia Sifneos, a personal trainer from Astoria, Queens, who at 59 — and like Kennedy — boasted chiselled biceps.
Sifneos voted for Biden in 2020 but complained that the president had been “hijacked” by the Democratic party’s leftwing fringe. “He turned his back on the middle class,” she said. While she fled the Democratic party, her brother and sister-in-law were former Trump voters who, she said, were now “like us — diehard Kennedy supporters”.
Greg Fischer, a Long Islander who is, himself, an inveterate independent seeker of public office, smiled in despair as he expressed the sense that ordinary people were doomed in a world dominated by powerful interests.
“Look, we’re nobody. Nobody,” he said, glancing around the room. “We’re ground up in the machine every day.”
He rejected the suggestion that a vote for Kennedy was a waste: “You always hear that when you’re an independent candidate. That is the standard line to deflect and defend.”
After his speech, Kennedy stayed behind to service an assembly line of selfie-seekers numbering in the hundreds. The Grateful Dead’s 1970 anthem “Truckin’” played from a sound system: “What a long, strange trip it’s been . . . ” Then he stood before the media and took questions — sometimes dispatching them with a simple “yes” or “no” and sometimes pausing before delivering an extended reply that veered from a predictable script.
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Asked about Ukraine, for example, Kennedy said he would end the war “very quickly” by talking with Vladimir Putin. “I negotiate for a living,” he said, waving away concerns that he could handle the Russian leader. He also referred to his uncle’s dealings with Nikita Khrushchev six decades ago as he expressed sympathy for Russia’s security needs.
“I don’t think the relentless expansion of Nato has been a good thing for anybody,” Kennedy said, urging neoconservatives in Washington to accept the reality of a multipolar world.
Yet when it came to Israel and Gaza, a man who proudly declared himself “anti-war” struck a different tone. Israel, he said, “has not only a right but a duty to protect its citizens” and warned that Hamas would only use a ceasefire to rearm and prepare for another attack.
He blasted corrupt Palestinian political leaders for squandering billions of dollars in aid. Asked, then, what he would do to help Palestinians, he replied: “I would support getting rid of Hamas.”