Mark my words: Joe Kennedy III will run for president in 2020. Though he will lose, he is the Democratic Party’s best hope.
You may ask why you should believe me. It’s because I have a track record. I called Trump’s nomination in 2015 and his victory four months before the election, without flinching on election night, when I was still a reluctant liberal. I could see that the left was living under the delusion that their voter’’ hatred of Trump would drive them to the polls as much as Trump’s fanatical base. Democrats and enablers continue to believe. I have seen polls showing Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey and Bernie Sanders beating Trump by double digits.
Maybe the polls skew to particular demographics, but I trust the gambling odds a bit better where betting on Trump gets you $2 for every $5 you spend. In spite of the country’s economic uptick, a lot of prominent Democrats think Trump’s defeat is an inevitability no matter who trots out with a cane against him, as they still live under the assumption that every day working Americans see the world through the same lens as coastal elites.
Trump’s State of the Union address highlighted Trump’s vision coming to fruition. He exhibited how his tax cuts have stimulated growth and put money in the pockets of Americans across social classes. He spoke from the heart, which fired up his base, drove GOP unity and confounded the left — which has been living in an echo chamber where everything Trump does is worse than Watergate.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz even found a way to criticize corporations giving away bonuses as the direct result of the Trump tax cut.
Trump expressed a sincere desire to work across party aisles.
The left, of course, wanted to vomit.
Though Trump’s first State of the Union address was by all accounts theatrical and moving, by 2020 it will be clear that the most historically significant event of the night was the coming out party of Joe Kennedy III. The legacy of Robert F. Kennedy was given the task of rebutting the president.
Kennedy’s speech wasn’t exactly a rebuttal, but a returning of his party’s values. Rather than divide by racial and cultural lines for social justice, he restored Obama’s vision of America in 2008, a desire to restore hope, change and unity over a broken culture Hillary’s campaign all but ignored. Think of it as a socialist version of “America First.” Kennedy pointed to the divisions in America between sex and race and how to overcome them, as well as the perceived heartlessness of Republican public policy.
Though his words were sometimes pronounced awkwardly and some spit hung off the edge of his lips, he echoed an era where people felt politicians cared for their interests, blowing away the fossils and bozos currently leading the party. Bernie Sanders has the stench of failure – even if the primary election was rigged – and he will be 79. Joe Biden will be 77 and does little to inspire confidence, and though she is probably the most viable candidate, I can’t see Elizabeth Warren at 70 withstanding blows with Donald Trump. And the rest of the Democratic contenders (Kirsten Gillibrand, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris and Corey Booker) are shooting themselves in the foot with far-left social justice agendas. The best answer in my humble opinion is Kennedy, who injects the party with youth (he won’t even be 40), nostalgia and the faux-sincerity the party has been lacking since Obama’s unlikely victory in 2008.
Still, Kennedy will lose.
The people outside America’s major cities and the extreme left have caught on to the reality that the Democratic Party does not have their best interests at heart.
Protest movements like Antifa, Black Lives Matter and even seemingly innocuous things like the Women’s March (which I wrote about last week) are going to dissuade swing voters from voting left much more effectively than the mainstream media’s demonic portrait of Trump will scare voters against voting right. Working class guys in the Rust Belt aren’t really that into pussy hats and blowing up banks. They generally react well to more income.
In spite of the Democrats’ certainty that they will win the race in 2020, the brains behind the powers that be are surely shaking their heads at the prospect of anyone in their party running for president, particularly against Donald Trump.
When all else fails, find a Kennedy. Look no further than RFK’s grandson, Joe Kennedy, the third man in the clan to don the name of his great-grandpa, the accomplished bootlegger. Ironically, Joe the third is the only Kennedy teetotaler I’ve ever heard of, so another Chappaquiddick incident is unlikely.
I think I’m going to be blinded by the light of his earnestness, if the reflection off his snow-white skin preaching about white privilege doesn’t do it first, but it would be unwise to underestimate his appeal.
I’ve never seen him utter a sentence without looking down at a piece of paper, but he definitely is of Camelot. Are you sure that the press pictures of him aren’t archival footage from the 60s?
The Democratic Party is indistinguishable from #theresistance movement, which is really just neocons and establishment liberals fighting for institutional power under the guise of socially liberal values. Everyone fighting Trump is being conned. Joe Kennedy may be their voice and we should be wary of him, as he represents not just an aesthetic but an ideological return to an Obama White House, which is the real cause of the division in America that the left blames on Trump.
Jesse Bogner is a screenwriter and a journalist. His memoir and social critique, “The Egotist,” has been translated into four languages.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
