The Warrior Queen and the Clown King

Even before Kamala Harris began her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, her campaign made clear to Donald Trump against whom he would be running.  The introductory video included a snippet from an interview in which Harris was discussing how a woman moved forward in a man’s profession.  “Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open, and sometimes they won’t…and then you need to kick that fucking door down.”  Although they bleeped the operative word and Harris laughingly apologized for her language, the message to Trump was right there, calculated to be unambiguous.

She intended to kick his fucking teeth in.

Then Harris came out, dressed for battle.  No white for her. Hillary Clinton had made that mistake in 2016.  White might recall the suffragettes, but white could also seem virginal.  No, no.  Like Michelle Obama, Harris wore dark blue, buttoned up and coiled to strike.

No more shying away from being a badass prosecutor…another former associate had described her in just those terms…no woke, no weak, no wonky.  Although the early part of her speech focused with warmth and affection on her middle-class upbringing and her debt to her parents, her sister, and her neighbors, Harris soon pivoted to delivering a courtroom summation of her case against Donald Trump and his Republican enablers.  The final message was one many past Democratic candidates had tried to enunciate but could not pull off—not Biden, not Hillary, not Al Gore, not even Obama.

Bring it on.

Harris left that stage letting Trump, Republicans, her fellow Democrats, and particularly independent voters know who they will see for the next seventy-some days.

The Warrior Queen.

What Democrats seem finally to have grasped is that adopting a soft, welcoming, we-don’t-want-to-offend-anyone demeanor is a losing strategy against the perception of strength, even if it is the sort of obvious, false macho strength that would provoke eye-rolling at a dinner party. 

What is more, by claiming “freedom” and “patriotism” as their own, Democrats, at long last, have stopped playing defense and instead became an invading army.

Even Donald Trump is not so self-absorbed that he failed to recognize that here is a threat like no other.

So, coward that he is, Trump became desperate for reinforcements.  After alienating everyone but the party’s bootlickers, however, no Republican worth having would be available.  Instead, Trump settled on the only member of the Kennedy family who did not loath him.  But instead of JFK, RFK, or even Ted, Trump got the Clown King.

In theory, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would bring both celebrity and a small but key section of the electorate to Trump’s team and thus provide a margin of victory in swing states where polling indicated Kennedy’s followers would overcome Trump’s current shortfall among other voters.

It is extremely unlikely to work out that way.  Far more likely is that Kennedy will cost Trump votes.

The first factor to consider is the man himself.  Once an admired environmental lawyer, Kennedy has turned into a bizarre, conspiracy-spouting opportunist who would have gladly endorsed the Democrats if they had offered him anything at all.

And he comes with baggage, verrry heavy baggage.

Much of it involves animals.  The story of him dumping a bear cub carcass in Central Park, along with a bicycle whose origins are more obscure, to leave the impression that the bear had been killed while perhaps waiting for a performance of Shakespeare in the Park is well known. 

Less talked about is the possibility that Kennedy once dined on barbecued dog. Although he later claimed the image of the canine on a spit he texted to a friend was actually a goat, the friend told Vanity Fair that Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul, so he was certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat.  In any case, it’s grotesque.”  In addition, fact checkers contacted a veterinarian who said the roasting carcass in the photo was dog, not goat. 

Kennedy has thus upped the ante, making Kristi Noem seem almost normal for merely shooting her dog.  On the bright side, the Trump campaign can now justly assert that they are not discriminating against cats.  

Perhaps all these eccentricities were the result of the worm that Kennedy said ate part of his brain…and then died in situ.  The worm had quite a meal.  In the 2012 deposition for his divorce action, Kennedy admitted, “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

In the realm of human behavior, Kennedy replied to an accusation of sexual assault by noting, “I am not a church boy,” and then refusing to comment when asked directly if he had done it.  “There are many skeletons in my closet,” he revealed later.

Then there are the assertions that chemicals in drinking water cause children to become transgender, and that vaccines cause any number of serious disorders, including autism, all of which have been repeatedly debunked.

All in all, in a campaign in which the top candidates have been accused of being “weird,” Kennedy fits right in.  Even arch-Republican Scott Jennings, who would defend Trump if he had indeed shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue, noted on CNN that he is more than a little wary of this merger.  Kennedy will be a highly visible surrogate, Jennings sighed, but that means the Trump campaign will have to live with anything he says, much of which is sure to be perversely newsworthy.

Still, the only real question is whether Kennedy can deliver enough votes for Trump to win in the states where the margins promise to be minuscule.  Despite what poll numbers currently indicate, the answer is almost certainly no.

When Kennedy’s numbers dropped from 15% to 4%, Republican strategists, including Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, attributed that fall to Democrats abandoning him after Harris replaced Biden, leaving the lion’s share of the residue to Trump.  While this may have a grain of truth, 538, far more reliable, said even the smaller number is split near even between the candidates.

The assumption that Trump-leaning Kennedy voters will switch to Trump is dubious as well.  Most of Kennedy’s support is among low propensity voters who could just as easily jump to Cornel West or Jill Stein or, most likely, stay home.  The marriage of convenience between the environmentalist and the anti-environmentalist, regardless of each man’s stumbling effort to pretend to support the other, is not especially convincing, which could further derail the RFK to DJT express.

But the most significant impact will be among swing voters and, especially, disaffected Republicans.  In addition to her other themes, one of main products Harris is selling is stability.  She has not hidden from immigration, inflation, and crime, but rather addressed each one head on and promised to seek solutions through bipartisan outreach.  This might legitimately be characterized as wishful and likely impractical, but even at its worst, it returns government to its proper role, something Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary-to be Kennedy will surely not do.

Aligning with Kennedy after picking the unfortunate JD Vance signals even further that a second Trump term would be chaotic and unfocused in a nation that seems sick of both.  Thus, the dribble of voters that Kennedy might deliver may well be a good deal less than Trump loses to the candidate who actually acts like a president.