Columnist Michelle Goldberg makes her disdain for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. clear in her Friday New York Times editorial. She paints Kennedy as a dangerous “crank.” But, when Goldberg wrote in the editorial generally about supporters of Kennedy she encountered at a June campaign event in New Hampshire, her description seems to be closer to objective and is in line with what I have observed from afar.
Goldberg’s general description of the Kennedy supporters is also, in my view, quite positive. For Goldberg and many of her regular readers, though, her description is likely negative. The difference springs from differing views regarding the United States government and its expansive exercise of power.
Describing the people she encountered at a campaign speech by Kennedy in New Hampshire this month, Goldberg wrote:
The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.
This description of Kennedy supporters’ assessment of the situation Americans face makes me think they are my kind of people.
Also wrote Goldberg, “the movement around [Kennedy] represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.”
That sounds like what America needs.