In a presidential election marked by the high age of the main contenders, 70-year-old independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no exception. On Saturday, February 24, John F. Kennedy's nephew was addressing the California Libertarians, who gathered for a convention at a hotel in Costa Mesa, Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Stern-looking, with a tired face, he spoke in a hoarse voice, damaged by spasmodic dysphonia that began in his forties.
Since leaving the Democratic Party in October 2023 to launch a Third Way bid for the White House, Kennedy has been crisscrossing the country in search of the support he needs to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states on November 5. It has been rumored that the Libertarian Party, which qualifies in some 30 states and has yet to name its standard-bearer, might consider his candidacy. Kennedy has repeated to the press that he wasn't ruling anything out.
Standing on the podium in a light gray suit, the son of Robert Kennedy – the former US Attorney General assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968 while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination – patiently went through the motions. A man with a more than illustrious name, he finds it useful to reintroduce himself. A lawyer from the Democratic establishment, he described in detail the path that led him from defending the environment to denouncing the three knights of misguided capitalism: "Big Pharma," "Big Oil" and "Big Tech," ultimately breaking with the traditional parties. Before his speech, participants were searched, an unprecedented security measure at this stage of the primaries in a "small" party, but libertarians are great defenders of the Second Amendment, which, according to the Supreme Court, guarantees the carrying of weapons, including concealed ones.
Kennedy described his beginnings. In the 1980s, he became involved with the fishermen of the Hudson, New York's pollution-threatened river, who had been fighting the big industrial groups since 1966. He was dismayed to discover that these groups had support within the American government. The experience, he said, inspired his career as a critic of "crony capitalism." "There's a cushy socialism for the rich and this kind of brutal, merciless capitalism for the poor," he said.
The libertarians listened politely, although many, like Mike ter Maat, a candidate for the party's nomination, believe, in contrast, that the answer to monopoly capitalism is "more privatization." Activists were curious to hear the man who has become the troublemaker of the November 5 election campaign, but their minds were elsewhere. Despite disaffection with traditional parties, they are not making any headway in voting intentions. In 2020, their candidate, Jo Jorgensen (1.2% of the vote), failed to improve on the score achieved in 2016 by former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson (3.3%), the best performance for a third party since Texas billionaire Ross Perot's Reform Party coup in 1992 (19% of the vote).
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