At a low-profile event in New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his interest in running for president.
The well-known nephew of late President John F. Kennedy capped off a speech he gave on March 3 at St. Anselm’s College with the announcement.
During his visit to the college, Kennedy, an environmental activist and vaccine skeptic, told a capacity crowd that he’s considering a presidential run.
“I’m thinking about it, and I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it,” Kennedy told the small crowd that came to hear him talk at the Goffstown college’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the Kennedy dynasty, RFK Jr. is a registered Democrat, but he has also been denounced by members of his famous political family for his anti-vaccine views.
He has been an odd bedfellow in the world of high-profile national politics. Trump picked the pro-gun control Democrat to chair his presidential commission on vaccine safety and integrity.
The last Kennedy to run for president was RFK Jr.’s uncle, Ted Kennedy. He competed for the Democratic nomination in 1980 against then-President Jimmy Carter. Ted Kennedy eulogized RFK Jr.’s father Robert Kennedy after he was assassinated.
Prior to Ted Kennedy’s run, the senior Robert F. Kennedy was the last Kennedy to run for President. He was challenging incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.
His campaign for the presidency came to a tragic end on June 6, 1968, when he died in the hospital from gunshot wounds sustained at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the state’s primary.
RFK Jr. was 14 years old when his father was killed. He’s now 69.
As a Democrat, he remains critical of current President Joe Biden.
Before announcing his potential run for president, RFK Jr. lambasted the Democratic National Committee for changing the primary calendar that displaced New Hampshire’s long-standing rank as first in the nation primary.
“We have the president of our party, the president of the United States, who feels like he needs to move this primary to a state where he can better control the outcome. What does that say to people?” he said.
However, for the most part, Kennedy still embraces Democratic ideology. He’s a huge promoter of climate change theories, having co-authored the book “Climate In Crisis” in 2020.
As an environmentalist, he’s the founder of Waterkeeper Alliance, a national clean water advocacy organization, and was named Time magazine’s 2010 “Hero for The Planet.”
He has also been hailed by the LGBT community for his support. In 2011, he joined the Human Rights Campaign in its call for changing marriage to include gay unions.
Kennedy is married to Hollywood actress Cheryl Hines, who publicly criticized her own husband when he compared COVID-19 vaccine mandate policies to Nazi Germany.
In the comment, Kennedy made a specific reference to Anne Frank, who wrote about her experiences during the Jewish Holocaust before dying.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said in his speech. “I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible.”
Hines posted on Twitter that her husband’s comments were “reprehensible and insensitive” and that his opinions weren’t a reflection of her own.
Kennedy later apologized for comparing the plight of Frank to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, writing in a tweet that his “intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control.”
He didn’t indicate when and if he would officially declare his candidacy for a run for President. So far, New York Times best-seller Marianne Williamson, at one time a spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey, is the only Democrat to officially declare their plans to run against Biden in 2024.
As recently as last month, Biden, who’s now 80, said he’s intending to seek reelection.
