Ron DeSantis’s Reckless Embrace of RFK Jr.

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

 

Last week, the flagging Ron DeSantis presidential campaign announced a “reboot,” seeking to recover momentum in the primary race. This week, the reboot continued (as all good reboots do, over several news cycles), with the campaign shedding nearly 30 percent of its staff. And DeSantis, attempting to right the ship, went on Outkick The Coverage with Clay Travis to say he’d entertain the idea of appointing conspiracy-theorist and prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Joe Biden) to either the CDC or the FDA. You know, so he could “do his thing.”

 

DeSantis has either hopelessly lost the plot in his campaign, or he’s myopically focused on appeasing the “New Right” to the exclusion of all else. This strategy will persuade many of his previous supporters (even the fervent ones) to desist from their belief that he’s the best possible alternative to Donald Trump. And so the strategy will neither win him the primary nor the general election.

 

DeSantis has been seeking out larger mainstream-media venues in recent days as part of his retooling. It’s a good idea, simply because he’s been narrowcasting up until this point to a fickle, evanescent (and arguably electorally nonexistent) “extremely online” GOP base. His appearance with Jake Tapper went well. But in an interview with Clay Travis posted today, he has stepped in it in a genuinely new way. Travis asked him whether he would put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his ticket as vice president. I will simply quote the response below, my emphasis added:

 

Here’s the issue, like, I’m aligned with him on Fauci, and the corruption, and the health bureaucracies 100 percent, and I think he’s probably said, done some other things that I agree with too, but, end of the day, he’s more liberal, very liberal on some – I mean he used to say, I don’t know if he still believes this, that if you deny climate change you should go to jail, things like that . . . so I just think at the end of the day you need someone that’s going to reflect the broad values of the coalition. Yes, the medical stuff, I’m very good on that, so that does appeal to me, but there’s a whole host of other things that he’d probably be out of step with? And so on that regard it’s like, okay, if you’re president, you know, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC, but in terms of being Veep, there’s, you know, 70 percent of the issues that he may be averse to our base on, you know that just creates an issue.

 

Congratulations to Ron DeSantis who, with this depressingly emblematic horse-blindered answer, has “just created an issue” himself. Before I continue further, I will re-emphasize, for those unaware, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not “just another Kennedy” (as if that itself is any sort of endorsement, this being a political family primarily known for its cupidity, concupiscence, and occasional outright criminality). He is a crazy man whose literary and public output has largely been devoted to the embrace of a number of notorious conspiracy theories throughout his career, not the least of which is his belief that Sirhan Sirhan, a man actually witnessed by dozens and photographed assassinating his father, may not have been the real killer. For present purposes however, let me mention his (1) emphatic and heartfelt belief that vaccines cause autism; (2) his recently aired theory that, “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.“

 

Would you appoint this man to either head or oversee the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control? Would you even consider it a remotely plausible pander?

 

I start from the prior that Ron DeSantis, given his pedigree and governing record, is not a stupid person. This is unfortunate for him, because it makes him look all the worse: Either this is a moronically ill-tuned attempt to play political pattycake with a fringe figure for some impossibly small sliver of Trump-leaning voters, or it reflects his true beliefs. I default toward the former out of charity, but the latter cannot be wholly excluded, either: DeSantis averred that RFK Jr. was a full 30 percent in tune with the GOP base, which, for conservatives who would prefer not to be put in prison for “denying climate change,” is sort of like saying the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party candidate is mostly in line with our views except for the whole “face eating” part.

 

Let us return to charity, however, and grant that this was just a bad attempt at playing to an audience; it was nevertheless a jarringly inapposite response, spewed forth on analytical autopilot as if by a rickety-bolted robot sent clanking out into the world without sufficient programming. I listened to DeSantis plod his way down the tortured garden path of analyzing whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would make a proper running mate, listened to him play electoral oddsmaker, and my mental reaction came from the gut, and from painful experience: “Oh no – this guy is the conservative Dukakis.”

 

That’s right, Michael Dukakis – who famously, when asked in a 1988 presidential debate against George H. W. Bush how he’d react if a criminal raped and murdered his wife, drifted off into a lengthy discourse about his intellectual and political opposition to the death penalty instead of simply saying, “Of course I’d want to kill the bastard, who wouldn’t?” Dukakis missed the point, and it was obvious to everyone that he just Did Not Get It, was unable to adjust on the fly with nuance to a powerfully emotional question and show voters that he was a human being, as opposed to a colorless print-out of policy achievements given human flesh.

 

I fear DeSantis is missing the point too. The obvious, instinctive answer here was: “RFK Jr. is a wacko and a Kennedy, if he wants to say nice things about me that’s fine but he’s their problem, not ours.” Instead, he launched into an analytical monologue that ended with a grotesquely unacceptable pander: to put a person actively opposed to modern medical care in charge of the federal government’s oversight of major aspects of it.

 

As somebody who is eager for any plausible, reasonable alternative to Donald Trump, I have been very open to the DeSantis candidacy, and am willing to suck up many disagreements with him. But his embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not making things easy.