By Bob Gaydos

Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. … challenging Joe Biden

  Be careful what you wish for, they say. They were on to something.

     A while back, I wrote a column expressing my desire (hope, wish) that the 2024 presidential election not be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. America needs to move on, I said.

      Trump is a totally incompetent, lying fascist who has seriously damaged American democracy, I said, and Biden is a competent, concerned, experienced public servant, who saved America from four more years of Trump. I still stand by all that.

      But I also noted that Biden would be 82 should he decide to run for president again in 2024, which he has now said he plans to do. That would make him 86 in the last year of his term. America’s oldest president.

        Seeing no relief from the Republican Party save for younger, nouveau fascist versions of Trump (no spring chicken either, he will be 77 next month), I said Democrats needed some new, younger, more vibrant candidates for president. Thanks, Joe, but America needs it, I said.

       I meant maybe an experienced governor or senator or a re-energized version of Vice President Kamala Harris.

       I did not mean Marianne Williamson or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. So far, that’s what we’ve got.

       Yes, both are younger than Biden, but both do qualify for Social Security benefits. Williamson, although she is 70, possesses considerable energy and appeals to a segment of younger voters. They know her on TikTok. An author, she also is not shy about challenging more mainstream Democrats, like Biden, about what she sees as their lack of urgent commitment to progressive goals.

    She has a point. She also has zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination, never mind the presidency.

     Kennedy, 69, is a different matter. His strongest weapon is his family name and history. But RFK Jr. does not stir the masses the way RFK Sr. did and he’s definitely no JFK. Time has also dimmed some of the vote-getting power of the Kennedy name.

     Son of the assassinated New York senator and U.S. attorney general and nephew of the assassinated president, this Kennedy is basing his campaign for the Democratic nomination primarily on the reputation he has gained as the most aggressive, best-known, anti-vaxxer in the country.

    That sounds like a terrific issue for a Republican. In fact, it probably will be. Fortunately for the country, but unfortunately for Kennedy, most Americans do not share his vigorous, scientifically discredited opposition to vaccines.

    Still, some recent polls put Kennedy drawing almost 20 percent among Democrats and Williamson up to 9 percent. While a bit surprising, since neither can be considered a mainstream candidate, that support is not a serious threat to Biden. And some Democratic voters may not know much about Kennedy beyond his lineage. Time will tell.

    Significantly, those same polls also show a solid majority of Democrats saying they would prefer that Biden not run again (too old), but that runs up against the overwhelming sentiment among Democrats (and many independents) that, if Trump is again the Republican presidential candidate (too scary), they would run barefoot over hot coals to vote for Biden again if he’s the Democratic candidate.

     That’s apparently what he’s banking on.  Vote for steady, experienced, moderate, sensible Joe over erratic, clueless, power-hungry, dangerous Trump — or any other Republican promoting fascism. The Biden campaign message is that he will save democracy now for the younger, more energetic Democrats who follow him to improve on a little later. Be patient.

     In certain context, it makes a lot of sense. Like it did in 2020. It’s Yogi Berra’s “deja vu all over again.”

     Such is the unfortunate state of politics in this democratic republic three years shy of its 250th birthday.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

Ah, Walt Whitman. How ironic that on the day I complete my reading of your Specimen Days and begin writing my humble thoughts for a course I’m taking at Empire State College, I should receive an email from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his message he bemoans the present state of our American democracy you so lovingly describe in your works. I hasten to add that it is not a personal message from him to me (as you might have received from one of the lofty personages of your era, but rather a message sent to many thousands of recipients via the internet) a form of modern communication you may have only imagined (and probably did) in your wildest dreams.

You see, I recently read a book he co-wrote (The Riverkeepers) for that same course and I learned that Kennedy has great love for nature, much as you did; he has worked tirelessly for several decades now to protect the environment. In The Riverkeepers he writes specifically about the Hudson River and its environs, places that you too knew well and loved.  

A bit of background: In the years since your passing, our country’s waterways became so befouled that it became necessary to pass laws to protect them and make them clean again. You would have been proud of the way ordinary citizens all over the United States banded together to fight for their passage by national, state and local legislatures.  The most important was the Clean Water Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. (Nixon was a despicable character but regarding this and some other matters of import he at least had sense enough to be on the right side of history.)

 As you shall see from Kennedy’s remarks, the Republican Party has changed much since the days when you wrote paeans of praise for Abraham Lincoln, and even since the aforementioned more recent days of Nixon.  In his message titled, “An Assault on Democracy,” Kennedy writes that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives “is swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world.”

He explains that a bill currently working its way through the House would “hogtie” the national government’s role in administering the federal Clean Water Act and give states veto power over critical water-quality decisions made by the Environmental Protection Agency. This, he says, would pave the way for “shortsighted and self-interested state politicians to dismantle their clean water laws in order to recruit filthy polluters.”

“Corporate polluters—through massive campaign donations and relentless fear-mongering—can easily dominate the state political landscapes. Their indentured servants in Congress…. are working to disrupt the existing balance between state control and federal oversight in our environmental laws by returning us to the days of limited federal supervision—a time when local government was on the side of polluters in a partnership that was stealing people’s livelihoods, their recreation, their health, safety, property values and their childhoods.” This is not exactly the direction you saw the country going in before you shuffled off this mortal coil, Walt, but that is what it was like before the Clean Water Act was enacted.

“The original drafters of the Clean Water Act were keenly aware of the problems inherent in leaving all responsibility to the states,” writes Kennedy. “Prior to 1972, that scheme had ignited rivers and firestorms and left Lake Erie declared dead. We saw the results first-hand here on the Hudson River in the 1960s–where hundreds of fishermen lost their jobs because their beloved waterways had become too polluted to allow anyone to safely eat the fish. The Clean Water Act, enacted shortly thereafter, created a beautifully simple yet powerfully effective tool to help address these problems: a federal safety net for water quality that guarantees a minimum level of protection to all Americans, no matter where you live. And for nearly 40 years this approach has been working.”

Now, says Kennedy, the Republicans in Congress seek to roll back the clock by promoting “an agenda that benefits only those who seek to pollute our waterways—not the communities that depend on them.” Would you believe they even rejected an amendment to protect water bodies that serve as drinking water supplies, flooding buffers, recreation destinations and habitat for fish and game? “Sponsors of the bill would have none of it—further revealing their disinterest in the protection of the American public from the threats of water pollution,” writes Kennedy. “The American people didn’t stand for these congressional attacks to our environmental laws in the mid-1990s. And we must not stand for them today.”

I don’t think it presumptuous to say that my reading of Specimen Days strongly suggests you would agree. Indeed, as you wrote in the concluding passage,  “American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices—through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life—must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale.”

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.