Bobby Kennedy's Perot Problem
What happens when you "get under the hood"?
In 1992, Ross Perot made a splash, even debating the stiff Algore on Larry King Live, over trade policy. Perot was favored initially by voters. In June 1992, he led both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Perot abruptly dropped out of the race a month later, claiming his candidacy might throw the race into the House of Representatives, only to jump back into the race in September. Eventually, although Perot voters said they split roughly between Bush and Clinton as to whom they would have supported if Perot had not been in the race, Perot’s effect on specific districts in the electoral college worked to Clinton's advantage. Perot had fallen from almost 50% in June to just 19% support in October.
Why the crash? It is a cautionary tale for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who just announced himself as an independent candidate for president.
Perot was riding high so long as he could keep his solutions simple and avoid putting out too many details. “Let’s get under the hood” and fix things, he frequently said. But when people “got under the hood,” Perot didn’t have any specific programs at all to “stop the pitter patter of little feet going [south] across the Rio Grande” to set up American manufacturing there.
This is in sharp contrast to Kennedy, who caused many on the right to panic, thinking he would take votes from Donald Trump. Therein lies the problem. It isn’t that Kennedy lacks specifics. Rather it is that so far most voters have not bothered to find out what they are. When they do, RFK will look like “the hand grenade with a bad haircut” as someone once called Perot. And this attention to detail harms him dramatically with more conservative voters.
For example, Bobby not only wants to ban fracking, but to utterly destroy the entire U.S. plastics industry. This apparently caused such immediate backlash that the campaign had to walk it back, but no one yet has mentioned his lunatic war on plastics, or his calling Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as purveyors of hate.
Voters might suspect that Kennedy is a typical DemoKKKrat in his view of guns is in the DemoKKKrat anti-gun mainstream, though he has said that within the Second Amendment there is no way to reduce gun violence. What does that mean? It could easily mean he would sign any bans that a DemoKKKrat congress might bring him. He supports Affirmative Action and criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to end it.
Bobby is well known for his anti-vax positions. We are 100% with him on that. He supports ending the Uke war. Ditto. He has called for border security. Amen.
But his pro-abortion, anti-gun, anti-fracking, anti-plastics, pro-affirmative action positions are just now beginning to surface. Many of the so-called “swing” voters on the Republican end of the spectrum will be shocked and, well, “Perotized” when they learn who the real Bobby Kennedy is. DemoKKKrats will love those positions.
In short, the more Bobby is put into a Perot situation, the more he is a liability to Rutabaga or any other chowderdipper the DemoKKKrat demon-circus chooses to drop into the slot.
Larry Schweikart
Rock drummer, Film maker,NYTimes #1 bestselling author
