For a third party candidate to be anything but a spoiler they must articulate a different point-of-view from the two major political parties. This week Robert Kennedy Jr. picked Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. Kennedy’s backers have assailed the donor class and corporate control of politics, yet their man has picked a classic insider/donor-class elite as his running mate?

Can you imagine if a Democrat picked an elite donor as a running mate? Can you imagine the cries from the left about how their has been agency capture and corporate control of the Democratic Party?

This should put to rest any thought that RFK is a genuine progressive-populist. In fact it probably puts him in the same class as the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in terms of playing populist and trying to appeal to the working class while soothing insiders and advocating things that would make the elites more comfortable than ever.

In this case, RFK’s very image is at stake.

By Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons license.

Despite the assumption by many Democrats that RFK Jr. is a “Trump-like” candidate, I’ve found many of my former fellow travelers on the left more interested in him than they have been in any previous third party effort from the left- including those by the likes of Jill Stein and Ralph Nader. Those two candidates as we know effectively became election spoilers in 2016 and 2000 respectively.

In 1992 and 1996 Ross Perot was a serious third party candidate with clearly different ideas than the two major parties. Regardless of what you thought of them Irrespective of what you thought of Admiral James Stockdale’s performance in the debate, in 92’ Perot picked a very serious running mate. 

Perot did the same in 96’ with Pat Choate whom I disliked for his protectionist views, but it was a serious selection.  And quite frankly both Perot & Choate proved harbingers of political winds to come, even if they were winds people like myself wish had never arrived.

Conversely…

RFK has picked in Shanahan a big money donor who has never truly articulated her views on issues (outside of IVF) and from what I can see, hasn’t sat down and done a major interview since being selected. Yet when I have confronted the progressives backing RFK about this, or as I call them the alt-left, it’s been one excuse after another. RFK needs a donor who knows how to break regulatory capture, RFK needs a donor who knows how corrupt the Dems are, RFK needs a donor who can break the big money monopoly of corporatist Dem Party, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve heard it all in the last few days.

In my opinion, we badly as a nation need third parties to add to the dialogue and give different perspectives, but so far RFK’s campaign has been mostly about grievance, anger and no accountability. Everything is always someone else’s fault. The Democrats are to blame for everything under the sun. Any mistake or misstep RFK makes is because of the Democrats control of the media or whatever.

Enough is enough.

I’m tired of these irrational, illogical explanations and quite frankly tired of the alt-left. They’ve never held GOPers to the same standard they hold Democrats and now are taking the plunge on a truly irrational candidacy based not around what America could be, but around grievance, which is how the GOP runs its campaigns these days.

We already get plenty of victimization and lack of accountability from the right. I didn’t expect it from the left, especially a Kennedy…but here we are.

And not only do they engage in false equivalencies, they actually now say the DEMOCRATS ARE WORSE!!!

On Monday in a CNN interview RFK said the following-

“But the question was, who is the worst threat to democracy? And what I would say is, I — I’m not going to answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is, because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important.”

This is the sort of rhetoric I hear CONSTANTLY from people on the left. I mean constantly. RFK Jr. isn’t simply saying something irresponsible he’s pandering to leftists who’ve held a grudge against all elected Democrats since 2016, and even attack the likes of AOC and Bernie Sanders on Twitter for “selling out.”

For what it’s worth the CNN host, Erin Burnett looked not only incredulous in disbelief when he said this but pushed back hard. But that only fed the narrative popular on leftist Twitter Monday night and Tuesday morning that CNN was “in the tank” for Biden and Democrats.

Joe Biden is absolutely positively the only acceptable choice this year for President. His economic record has been the sort of classic liberal one we wish we had gotten from Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama.

This reality has pushed the alt-left, with its permanent set of grievances against the Democrats toward the crazy culture of victimization advocated by the right.

When it comes down to it, the bottom line about RFK Jr’s candidacy is he is more Ron DeSantis than Bernie Sanders. Take that to the bank.