There’s a political cartoon going around that shows John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy sitting on a couch watching a speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The two hold their palms to their heads and moan that their legacy is being twisted and ruined.
This has the situation completely backward. It isn’t RFK Jr. who is rejecting the Kennedy brothers’ legacy, but President Joe Biden and the modern-day Democrats.
It’s been said many times — and it happens to be true — that if JFK were alive today and he were espousing the ideas of his 1,000-day presidency, he would be a Republican. JFK was a staunch Cold War anti-communist/socialist. He espoused lower tax rates, was pro-life, served our country in uniform valiantly, was patriotic, was a hawk on protecting First Amendment civil liberties, and he and his brother, who served as attorney general, took on union and government corruption.
Not many Democratic leaders today check any of these boxes.
This is why the Left has come to detest RFK Jr. He is an inconvenient candidate who is exposing the Democrats’ identity crisis. The party leaders today denounce RFK for what were mainstream Democratic values 60 years ago. The DNC effectively booted him out of the party for this very apostasy. Now they’re terrified that there are a good many Democrat voters who long for the party of old and may splinter off.
This is exactly the point RFK Jr. is making when he campaigns around the country as an independent: “I’m a traditional Democrat, and … part of my mission here is to summon the Democratic Party back to its traditional ideals,” Kennedy says.
Sadly, that party is gone with the wind. RFK Jr. is sounding a bit like Ronald Reagan, who famously said in 1980, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left me.”
On no issue have Democrats reversed themselves more completely than on the role of tax cuts to promote growth and economic stimulus.
It was JFK who famously said that “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”
When I met with RFK Jr. a few weeks ago, he told me, “I learned from my uncle that tax rate cuts incentivize growth.” JFK cut tax rates by 30%, and almost all Democrats back then supported the measure. The economy and revenues exploded. The rich paid more, not less.
Today, Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want to raise tax rates to 50%, 60% and 70%, not lower them. That would blow up the economy.
I don’t agree with some of RFK Jr.’s environmental positions and some of his odd conspiracy theories, but you have to admire his courage for calling out Democrats who have fled from their party’s traditional values. RFK Jr. is right on at least half the issues — which puts him way ahead of most Democrats in Washington today.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and chief economist with FreedomWorks. He is the author of “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”
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