"Mr. Kennedy is the one person who has the qualities that can bring about the unity that most Americans are hungering for. He speaks a language of conciliation and compassion."

Said Dennis Kucinich, RFK Jr.'s campaign manager, quoted in "Why Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 Bid Is a Headache for Biden/The unexpected polling strength of an anti-vaccine activist with a celebrated Democratic lineage points to the president’s weaknesses, which his team is aiming to shore up" (NYT).

Notice the descriptor: "anti-vaccine activist." A lot depends on the strength of that label. If people accept it as a warning — steer clear of this nut — then Biden easily prevails. But if that insult is questioned — what is it they don't want us to look into? — then Biden is caught flatfooted.

On Joe Rogan's podcast, Kennedy expressed his skepticism about the relationship between vaccine manufacturers and the federal government. It isn't the idea that vaccines don't work, but questioning why so many vaccines, why they are mandated, especially for babies, and how the side effects are balanced against the benefits. Right now, we're seeing an avoidance of debating with Kennedy, but will that strategy work? People who lived through the rigors of the coronavirus pandemic may demand that the experts prove they were worthy of the trust and obedience they demanded. 

It's been a while since I've stumbled across a sentence that called out to me to challenge you to diagram it.

But I ran into one today:

One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippie allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals—suggestion of vitiated blood in their complexion—to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left.

That's from Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," which I'm reading again, not because the conventions are coming up but because — as you can see from the previous post — I've been thinking about journalism in relation to violent protests. I've been asking for better investigative journalism and thinking about how much the journalism we're seeing today is a devolution of the "new journalism" that Mailer participated in creating. I had a long off-blog conversation this morning about how the article discussed in the previous post compared to Mailer's writing about the riot outside the Democratic convention in 1968 (and how today's riots aspire to attain the reputation of the 1968 riot, which is that it was the police who rioted).

Anyway, that long sentence — which my readability calculator tells me is on the 20.4 grade level — comes from a description of the crowd that had gathered to welcome Eugene McCarthy:

[T]he crowd of 5,000 at Midway waiting for Gene McCarthy were remarkably homogeneous, young for the most part, too young to vote, a disproportionate number of babies in mother’s arms—sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work! (The middle-class Left would never learn that workingmen in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe—the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schoolteachers they used to hate!) 

"Too young to vote" back then meant under 21.

"An Honest Socialist/Could Bernie Sanders show Elizabeth Warren how to beat Hillary?"

A Wall Street Journal editorial. (There's a subscription wall that you can bypass if you Google some of the text and get your own link.)

Milton Friedman once observed that the 1928 platform of the Socialist Party of America may have seemed radical at the time, but nearly all of it was eventually absorbed by mainstream parties and became law. That’s also Mr. Sanders’s hope. He wants to drive the Democratic Party debate to the left so it drags Hillary Clinton along with it.

And it may be working. Mrs. Clinton has already disavowed her husband’s trade agenda. She’s proposed a rewrite of the First Amendment to limit political speech, and don’t be surprised if she also embraces expanded entitlements. The difference is that Bernie believes what he says, while Hillary believes whatever seems necessary to win.

The practical political question is whether Mr. Sanders, or some other liberal gadfly, can do well enough to serve as a stalking horse for a stronger candidate against Mrs. Clinton. Recall how Eugene McCarthy drove LBJ out of the 1968 race with a strong performance in the New Hampshire primary. Robert Kennedy soon jumped in as a more electable antiwar candidate.

LBJ really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win. As for that 1968 business... we ended up with Nixon... who by today's standards was a big old liberal.

[NOTE: The last paragraph of this post is rewritten. Originally, it said: "And we ended up with LBJ, who really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win." That's not a proper account of 1968!]

"Friends, Romans, countrymen..."

This amused me. Cowboy style. I ran across it because I was looking for the text to the famous Mark Antony speech, which I'd been forced to memorize in junior high school, many decades ago. (Here's Marlon Brando doing it, not amusingly.) And what got me testing my own memory was something I'd just read about Barack Obama, which someone had emailed me, a propos of the recent "born in Kenya" dustup. It's a GQ article from November 2009 called "Barack Obama's Work in Progress."

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else? Robert Draper recounts the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.

I haven't combed through that whole article looking for the Kenya connections, but I noticed this bit about Shakespeare:

Sometime in 2002, the young state senator pays a daytime visit to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The artistic director, Barbara Gaines, is happy to show the politician around. Watching the carpenters erect the set, he asks Gaines which play is about to be performed. “Julius Caesar,” she tells him.

At first, Obama doesn’t say anything. Then, in a very soft voice, he begins to recite some twenty lines from the play. As he does so, he places his hand on his heart, as if stricken by the words’ transcendent beauty.

The director is agog. She has never heard an elected official quote Shakespeare in such a way.

Now, wait a minute. Who, upon mention of "Julius Caesar," doesn't start going "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me you ears..."? If it was some other 20 lines from the play, I might be impressed. The fact that he went on for 20 lines is sort of cool as a demonstration of memory. It's more than I can do without missing some words, but then, I learned it during the LBJ administration. But who goes on for 20 lines, putting on a memory show? Maybe you would if you saw that you were getting the director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater agog.

And would you put your hand on your heart? (Cf., Obama not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.)

Back to GQ:

Later, she tells a co-worker, “I just had the most amazing experience. I met the first politician to have the soul of a poet.” (The first, she means, since Abe Lincoln, who quoted lines from Macbeth less than a week before his assassination: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke…)

The soul of a poet. Doesn't anyone remember Eugene McCarthy?



Many women loved this Senator from Minnesota, who challenged LBJ in 1968, and the poetry was part of it. My maternal grandmother loved him because he was a poet. 1968 — there was a year. Bobby Kennedy pushes Senator McCarthy — the good Senator McCarthy — aside, LBJ declines to run, Martin Luther King is shot down, 2 months later Bobby follows him, and Nixon becomes inevitable.

By the way, speaking of MacBeth and LBJ, they made a play back then: MacBird!



The playwright, Barbara Garson said:

"People used to ask me then, 'Do you really think Johnson killed Kennedy?'... I never took that seriously. I used to say to people, 'If he did, it's the least of his crimes.' It was not what the play was about. The plot was a given."

Poet or bloviator? Maureen Dowd is drooling over Kerry: he's a poet! Okay, my grandma swooned over Eugene McCarthy because he wrote poetry. (Go ahead, click on that link, you can still be the first person to review his book of selected poems, published seven years ago, which reveals "deep wisdom conveyed with a deft touch," but do hurry, because there's only one left.)

Should we swoon over John Kerry because he responded to Dowd's culture questions with long, long answers, unlike George Bush, who, asked to name his favorite "cultural experience," said "baseball"? Well, consider that, reeling off the names of 37 movies, he doesn't seem to have come up with a single offbeat or obscure title (Dowd cites "National Velvet," "The Deer Hunter," and "Men in Black"). Yet somehow Dowd manages to conclude that, when it comes to culture Kerry is (adopting Kerry's wife's adjective) "insatiable," while Bush is "incurious." She even, weirdly, says Kerry has a "vast palette of cultural preferences." A "vast palette"? Not palate? Well, then let's hope he has a really large thumb. (And, yeah, yeah, don't tell me, I know. And Heinz Kerry was referring to her husband's cultural interests with that adjective, as far as I can tell from Dowd's florid column. Florid column? Now everything sounds dirty. Focus, people!)

But what about poetry, how vast are his interests there? Why they extend to Keats, Yeats, Shelley and Kipling! And he writes it too, so Dowd's just in love. She quotes him:

"I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert," he said. "I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving."

Okay, now I just feel compelled to be mean. You want me to love the guy because of this, Maureen? I'm sorry.

First, what the hell was "moving," the encounter with the deer or the poem he managed to author? Either way, Kerry's complimenting himself, and that's unsavory. Either he's saying, I'm a sensitive guy because I have moving encounters with deer in the morning, or he's saying I'm a sensitive guy because I write moving poetry about encounters with deer in the morning. "Great" encounters with deer, no less.

Second, shouldn't a poet have some sort of way with words? It's bad enough to use "moving" ambiguously and come up with nothing more precise than "great" to describe you morning deer encounter, but "the barren desolation of the desert"? I'll pause to say it doesn't take great subtlety of mind to look at a desert and come up with the insight that it's barren and desolate, but I'll assume the poem goes somewhere and compares the desert to some damn thing (life itself!). But what I've just got to rail about is "barren desolation of the desert." As opposed to what? The fertile desolation of the desert? The barren camraderie of the desert? The barren desolation of the fruited plain?

Maureen, the man isn't a poet, he's a windbag!