Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called a press conference in the wake of President Joe Biden announcing on Sunday he would not continue as the presumed presidential nominee of the Democrat Party, but was endorsing his vice president as the nominee. Kennedy shared his reaction to the move in an X post:
I commend President Biden for stepping down. His infirmities were evident to any unbiased observer from the beginning. It was this progressive deterioration — and his abandonment of Democratic Party principles — that prompted me to enter the race and ensure American voters had a…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 21, 2024
The full statement read: (emphasis mine)
I commend President Biden for stepping down. His infirmities were evident to any unbiased observer from the beginning. It was this progressive deterioration — and his abandonment of Democratic Party principles — that prompted me to enter the race and ensure American voters had a viable, vigorous alternative to Donald Trump.
Yet the response of the DNC was to try and hide President Biden’s degeneration from the American public and disable democracy to ram him through to his party’s nomination.
Many Americans fear that the same DNC elites are about to rig the nominating process again to get a monumentally unpopular vice president to step into President Biden’s shoes.
I call on the Democratic Party to return to its traditional commitment to democracy and exemplify it with an open process. Instead of anointing a candidate hand-picked by DNC elites, the party should use neutral polling to identify the candidate who can best beat Donald Trump. The delegates should then select a nominee based on this information.
If they had done this to begin with, I would not have had to leave the Democratic Party.
Questions about whether there are problems ahead for Democrats who seek to swap out a candidate who won millions of votes during the primary with someone else at the convention were already swirling, as we wrote.
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During his afternoon presser, which was held at Hyannisport, Massachusetts, RFK Jr. began by commending Biden for stepping down, adding that “a year ago, a little over a year ago, when I entered this race, I predicted that President Biden suffered from a degenerative condition that was not going to improve, and that it would make it impossible for him to govern effectively.”
He noted that the “DNC’s reaction to that obvious condition” was to hide it from Americans and “use their power over the Democratic Party nomination process to make sure that nobody could compete with Pres. Biden, in a way that would expose his deficiencies.”
He said that is why “we are where we are today,” in “a period of crisis.”
Later in his remarks, he said GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump as “having a connection with the American people, a populist connection,” then continued, “but in many ways, it’s the same fraudulent connection that we saw with the DNC over the past year” while hiding their aim “to give us a president that represents corporate interests rather than the interests of the American public.”
He went on, saying that although Biden and Trump might appear to differ, “the big, existential issues that are actually facing our country are never addressed. The biggest of these is perhaps the national debt.” He says that “Pres. Biden and Pres. Trump offer no solutions” in their platforms.
“We need a leader who can stop feeding into the vitriol, feeding into the anger, stop feeding into the marginalization and polarization, and who can find those values that bring Americans together rather than focusing on these toxic issues that are intended to keep us all apart.”
Kennedy took questions after about the nearly 15-minute speech. In answering a question about the Democrats’ nomination process, he said:
What I suspect they’re going to do, which is to anoint Kamala Harris, a vice president who is monumentally unpopular with her own party–but they’re doing it because it’s the easiest way to hold on to the money. and she is [technical issue]. I think if they don’t open up the process, that it really is going to discredit this political party….[technical issue] to create the illusion of a democracy. But in fact, they’re, it’s a cabal that is choosing, in the same way that the Soviet Union did.”
He added that he would be open to listening to “the party elders,” if he was asked to take part in an open convention. “I would discuss something with them,” he said, but he still maintains this is a “two-person race” between himself and Trump.
When asked about Harris as the potential Democrat nominee, Kennedy said, “I think Kamala Harris is the party of war. She’s a war hawk. The Democratic PParty was always the peace party. Kamala Harris is a war hawk on Ukraine, she’s a war hawk on China….I think she’s not going to do anything about the national deficit.”
He continued, “She’s one of the authors, in terms of civil rights, she has one of the worst civil rights records of any public official….She is one of the primary authors of the school to prison pipeline. Despite a Supreme Court order, she released [sic] 5,000 prisoners….she kept them in there, saying we needed them for firefighting and other public works projects.”
You can watch the full press conference below, via the AP YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=live
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