The DNC Hate Machine

Why they're doing to Kennedy what they did to Bernie

By Anne Keala Kelly

Formerly known for liberal, social and economic policies, since the Clinton administration the Democratic Party has become increasingly siloed, so much so that even a rich white guy with the last name Kennedy gets the DNC version of the Special Ops treatment. They’re waterboarding his campaign with mainstream media’s half-truth-spells, intended to diminish him in American eyes and weaken voters’ capacity to decipher truth from lies.

Why? Because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dares to challenge the sitting president in a primary with an anti-war platform. Maybe it runs in the family. It was Vietnam for his father, it’s Ukraine for him. 

To the DNC biggies, Kennedy is a conspiracy nut the same way Bernie Sanders who, like Kennedy, campaigned on dialing down spending on militarism, was a crazy socialist. When Bill Clinton said, in 2017, “This is not going to be the party of Bernie,” what he meant was this is not the party of Americans calling for a change in course away from bloated budgets for the endless war machine. This coming from the man whose administration gutted social welfare programs, criminalized poverty and ushered in the prison industrial complex that, predictably, impacted the communities hardest hit by his so-called welfare reform. Those being poor, working class, and disproportionately People of Color, specifically Black people.

More than a few comparisons can be made to what the same people putting a hate on Kennedy today did to Sanders, twice, and by extension the millions of Democrats and Independents who supported him. 

Countless disenfranchised Democrats read, with dread, acting DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s account of how her predecessor, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the Clinton campaign rigged the 2016 primary. But it turned out that shredding the practice of registered Democrats deciding whose name should ride the top of their ticket wasn’t illegal, just unethical.

There’s a process in the Democratic primaries that has evolved over the past century. When there’s no incumbent, the voters (supposedly) have the power to choose their candidate. Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, ran an unlikely, but very popular campaign as a Democrat, ultimately squaring off against former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton. 

Reading Brazile’s breakdown of what transpired was like watching that scary movie scene where the babysitter realizes the sociopath who’s taunting her with threatening phone calls is making those calls from inside the house. Because what we learned was that Clinton was taking control of the DNC and the delegates within three months of declaring her candidacy, not after the convention, as was the party’s custom. 

Trying to get a primary vote in edgewise already feels like trying to hold a fistful of water. To see how it was all so predetermined was demoralizing. Yet, there it was, the undeniable fact that the people who control the Democratic party don’t think our primary votes should count. 

Sanders’ campaign was the big invisible. Bumper stickers and t-shirts with his iconic white fluffy hair and spectacles were, like him, everywhere. He was filling stadiums and giving interviews, but his popularity and ability to galvanize the youth and attract working class voters from both parties didn’t guarantee him mainstream media coverage. Corporate media, always chasing ratings and advertisers, would show 20 minutes of an empty mic waiting for Donald Trump’s arrival before they’d broadcast 20,000 people at a Sanders rally. 

Top Dems were absolutely opposed to Sanders, although that meant undermining the election process millions of registered Democrats signed up to take part in. Then, in 2020, they dusted off the same playbook from 2016 and, again, succeeded in bullying Sanders out of the game at a moment in history (Covid lockdowns) when his Medicare For All platform was more relevant than it had ever been before.

The New York Times reported on March 2, 2020, that superdelegates were unwilling to give Sanders their support, despite his recent win in the Nevada state caucuses. Five and a half months before the Democratic National Convention, they had already decided that even if Sanders arrived in Milwaukee with more delegates than any other candidate, rather than respect the people, a handful of party insiders were willing to force a brokered convention. And for reasons that only elected politicians care about, the idea of having to slug it out at a convention is too much to bear. 

In many ways Kennedy’s campaign mirrors Sanders’. He’s everywhere being interviewed on every podcast and by any journalist with a microphone, on the left (and former left), in the middle and on the right. The man would sit down with Martian TV if there was such a thing. But somehow all CNN or The New Yorker have to do is say his name and the words “conspiracy theory” or “anti-vaxxer” and voila, American democracy is saved. 

It’s all quite cruel, really, if you think about how a certain class of Americans has mastered the art of predatory elections, with the voters cast as prey. And the media’s part in that has been to maintain the endless election cycle, like an endless war on the American attention span. Did anyone who really gave a damn actually recover from 2020 by the time the 2024 race got underway? I asked my Magic 8 Ball that question and it answered, “Very doubtful.” I concur. 

Because people who get paid to talk endlessly about politics never stopped droning on about the existential threat of Donald Trump, which is neoliberal speak for “No Third Party Candidates Need Apply” and “No More Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders Types…Please.” It’s preemptive voter shaming. And this time it’s being heaped on RFK, Jr., the only Democrat running who is outspokenly against US money and meddling in Ukraine.

By definition, an existential crisis is an endgame scenario. But as metaphors go, what’s the greater existential threat, another Trump presidency or bankrupting the country while baby stepping our way to nuclear holocaust? We’re about a hundred billion into the Ukraine conflict, which is 10% of what the US spent on the Vietnam War (when adjusted for today’s dollar), and there’s no off-ramp in sight. 

Be honest, isn’t the specter of Trump exactly what the great Yogi Berra (maybe) said, “like déjà vu all over again?”

Whenever the DNC’s favorite boogeyman climbs in the polls, towing a ton of indictments and a mugshot to boot, Democrats have their typical atavistic reaction, forgetting (or denying) their role in the creation of the monster. And we all end up drowning in the verbal swill of politicians who have no intention of solving any problems. 

As this year winds down, it will likely become more obvious than it is now that President Joe Biden cannot sustain the rigors of a national presidential campaign. Watching his decline in public during this past year has often felt like witnessing elder abuse. Even now, as they perpetuate the fantasy of a second Biden term, Gavin Newsom is in the wings waiting to audition for the role. Depending on how well he does, photo ops with the Obamas in Martha’s Vineyard could be above the fold on every front page in America by mid-January.

But whenever it is announced that Biden won’t be running, that will make this an open primary. Will we, the voters, agree to live 2024 in the mind-numbing repetition of the DNC’s version of Groundhog Day, sans the love story or soul-searching personal growth? 

There’s a difference between power and truth. Whether those two things can co-exist in a 21^st century Democratic primary election remains to be seen. It will depend on whether or not the DNC is able to, once again, convince registered Democrats that we are too small, that we have no power, that our primary votes do not matter.