How RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson unserious primary challenges could help Biden

Journalists aren’t supposed to be starstruck by the people they cover. But I have to confess I was slightly awed when I arrived at New York Newsday in the early 1990s with ambitions of creating an urban environmental beat and learned the first person I needed to meet was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a charismatic heir-apparent to the legacy of his father, the slain U.S. senator, and his uncle, the 35th president.

I dealt with RFK Jr. — as the then-30-something Kennedy was inevitably branded — on a number of stories around his legal work for the Hudson Riverkeeper and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and found him an engaging, compassionate warrior for clean water, taking on corporate polluters like Exxon and GE as well as city bureaucrats who dumped raw sewage and failed to protect the upstate New York watershed. It’s no wonder that New York magazine hailed him in a 1995 cover story as, “The Kennedy Who Matters.”

I’m not sure how much RFK Jr. matters in 2023 — even as last week the now-69-year-old Kennedy threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic primaries in a challenge to incumbent President Joe Biden. His environmental victories have been largely forgotten for Kennedy’s new persona as a voice for the millions of Americans who embrace conspiracy theory and dangerously reject the science around vaccines.

RFK Jr. largely avoided vaccine talk in launching his campaign from his family’s historic home base in Boston in favor of populist themes, although he insisted it was 2020′s essential COVID-19 lockdowns that had “systematically wiped out” the middle class. Today, it’s no wonder that the likes of Donald Trump whisperer Steve Bannon embraces Kennedy as a chaos agent within Biden’s Democratic Party, or that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson rushed him on the air.

Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign feels like the ultimate embodiment of the famous Karl Marxism that history begins as tragedy and repeats as farce. In 1968, his father — who’d been his brother John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, then New York senator — also challenged an incumbent Democratic president in Lyndon Johnson and seemed to be forging an unprecedented alliance of Black and Latino voters and working-class whites before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. In 2024, we can feel empathy for the trauma experienced by RFK Jr. — just 14 when his dad was murdered — yet also be saddened and angered that his idea for recreating his dad’s coalition is not appealing to middle-class hope but to its fears, wrapped in disinformation.

Kennedy joins spiritual guru and author Marianne Williamson as one of two primary challengers to the 80-year-old Biden, expected to announce his own reelection bid as early as Tuesday. The similarities are striking. Both are roughly the same age (Williamson is 70) and neither has ever held elected office. Both have the same fatal flaw — Williamson has in the past voiced similar troubling views around vaccines, which in 2012 she called “Orwellian” — yet both are also centering the highly relevant critique that America has betrayed the middle class.

It’s not surprising that a handful of polls that have tested early support for Biden’s primary challengers shows support in the double digits (RFK Jr. got 14% in a USA Today poll). Democratic voters have a remarkably conflicted relationship with the 46th president — not just because of legitimate concerns around his age (he’d be 86 at the end of his potential second term) but also because the party’s core of younger voters sometimes feels whipsawed by policy shifts on fossil fuels or the border. Yet Biden is all but assured renomination because many voters (myself among them) feel he is by far the best defense against the unthinkable: American fascism under a second Donald Trump presidency.

The conventional wisdom, though, is that primary challenges weaken incumbent presidents, perhaps fatally. The Beltway pundits, who like generals are always fighting the last war, are correct in noting that the two other times a Kennedy challenged a Democratic incumbent (RFK Sr. in 1968 and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1980) resulted in a fall GOP victory (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan). Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush likewise lost the White House in elections where they were challenged within their own party (by Reagan and Pat Buchanan).

But most of today’s punditry is rooted in the 20th century and has aged even worse than today’s crop of candidates. The realities of 21st-century politics are that candidates win elections not by swaying the largely mythological swing voter but by energizing their potential core supporters to show up. Despite their flaws that make them unacceptable alternatives, both Kennedy and Williamson are giving voice to valid concerns held by young, stressed-out voters that Biden needs to hear — and that the president might ignore if he were unopposed in the primaries.

“I’m doing this because I think there are some things we need to talk about in this country, and we need to change.” Williamson has said in defending her 2024 candidacy. “People need health care. People need a way to get educated, to send their kids to college. People need a living wage. We need to save the environment for our grandchildren. Things that, you know, represent, among other things, a healthy middle class which we had in this country in the 1970s.”

I agree with every word of this, just as I agree with some of Williamson’s more specific proposals such as a wealth tax and more universal health care. It says a lot about the warped state of today’s politics that a two-time candidate had to go on the thoroughly corrupted right-wing Fox News to voice this left-wing critique. Yet, in a weird way, maybe it’s good to hear these important views from an ultimately unacceptable vessel in Williamson. Allow me to explain.

Here’s the reality of Joe Biden in his presidential era, beginning with his successful 2020 campaign. The Delawarean has survived a half-century of brutal U.S. politics and ended up on top because of his gut instincts, which have correctly told him to move left with the Democrats’ younger base, beginning famously with his embrace of same-sex marriage. Three years ago, his willingness to forge alliances with onetime rivals to his left like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on issues like student debt and climate convinced reluctant young voters to provide the margin of victory in the five states that flipped from Trump to Biden.

And yet Biden’s excellent political instincts are increasingly undermined by the boomer-generation advisers he surrounds himself with who seem locked into the same flawed conventional wisdom they watch every night on TV, that their boss can only win reelection by drifting right on a host of critical issues. And yet you don’t need to be a rocket scientist, a political scientist or even a vaccine scientist to see this is terrible advice.

In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Biden announced a bold plan to cancel some $500 billion in student debt and signed the most significant climate bill in U.S. history — and saw his approval rise and Democratic candidates overperform. In 2023, Biden has signed off on Alaska drilling, overridden D.C.’s Black council members on criminal justice, and embraced Trump-y border policies — and has seen his approval plummet back near historic lows.

» READ MORE: A Biden coalition is (barely) saving democracy. POTUS 46 must run again in ‘24

Simply put, Biden needs to return to his boldly liberal form of late 2020 and 2022 or those long voting lines we’ve seen on college campuses or in Georgia’s predominantly Black precincts won’t materialize in 2024, clearing the way for Trump’s democracy-ending vow of “retribution” in 2025. Hopefully, these primary challenges from the left will make Biden ignore the wrongheaded strategy of his confidants like Jeff Zients and Susan Rice.

I’ll be honest: This progressive would love to wake up on Nov. 6, 2024, in a fantasy-based world where Warren or Sanders has been elected 47th president. In the reality-based world, the choices are American autocracy under Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or a fragile democracy again led by Biden. And the rest of that reality is that we need to be pushing Biden constantly to be the best president he can be.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter