Kennedy's Path to Power
Kennedy cannot win in the normal way, by taking votes from Biden and/or Trump. All he can do is to try to prevent Biden or Trump from getting enough swing state votes to reach the winning number.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Bill Bonner, writing today from Dublin, Ireland
If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
— Mark Twain
This just in, from the Baltimore Sun:
…Trump this past week posted a roughly four-minute video online in which he called Kennedy “fake,” a “Democrat ‘Plant’” and “Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place” to help the Democratic president. Trump railed against Kennedy's family as “a bunch of lunatics.”
Today’s subject is the upcoming elections. We will take a look at a ‘trap door’ into the White House,which is the only way RFK, Jr. might get in.
Yesterday, we made our modest contribution to civic management. Historically, democracies are always perverted and corrupted as people use the government to gain power and money for themselves. We suggested a solution — giving up elections altogether, in order to have a more honest... even more ‘democratic’... government.
A national lottery, where the winners are determined on the basis of pure chance rather than pure BS! No campaign speeches. No bribery by campaign donors... and no subsequent robbery of the masses to pay them back. No need for an ‘inflation tax.’
Candidates wouldn’t be beholden to the Big Money... not to the Deep State, the firepower industry, Israel, Wall Street, or other Established Elite. And a Congress made up of randomly chosen citizens would be more representative of the public than a group of self-selected opportunists and political hustlers.
Yes, of course, a Congress made up of ordinary citizens would be clunky and quirky... many of the members would hold exotic, knucklehead ideas. But they would be honest ideas, mostly harmless, which wouldn’t go anywhere anyway.
Members of Congress could serve for a single year... and they would be bound by two rules: First, no conflict of interest; if they had a personal interest in the matter, they would have to recuse themselves. Second: they could only do things expressly allowed by the Constitution (all other powers reserved to the people and the states.)
But of course, we are dreaming... aren’t we?
Not a ‘normal’ democracy
Returning to the real world, let’s look at RFK, Jr.'s longshot bid for the White House. Will it prove that American democracy isn’t so bad after all? Will it show us that when the candidates are bad enough... and the corruption is pervasive enough... the voters really will revolt; they’ll throw the bums out... and get new bums in?
Probably not. So far, the voters have shown little interest in genuine reform and only lukewarm interest in RFK, Jr.
In a ‘normal’ democratic election, you’d expect the various candidates to present themselves to the voters in the primaries. Those most liked by the voters would go on to the run-off election.
But when Robert Kennedy threw his hat into the ring, the insiders chucked it back at him. Kennedy, a life-long Democrat, was edged out by party honchos, so that the voters never got to meet him... and never got to express themselves. No debates. No ‘meet and greets.’ And the mass media did everything it could to discredit him. He was a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ they said, as if that should disqualify him for public office. Horrors... he thought the covid vaccine should have undergone normal testing and trials before being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people. He thinks the CIA may have been mixed up with the death of his uncle, JFK. And even his own kith and kin don’t want him in the Oval Office, we are told.
Shut out of the democratic party primaries by the party jefes... and spurned by the media that had previously regarded him as a hero of the greenish left... he now runs as an Independent.
And now, the press insists that he is a ‘spoiler.’ That is, if you vote for him, you are ‘throwing your vote away,’ because he can’t win.
If so, whose victory party is being spoiled? Will he take more votes from Trump or from Biden? The Democrats say he is in league with Trump, siphoning off votes that would otherwise go to their man, Joe. Trump, meanwhile, says he is a ‘democratic plant’ who hopes to throw the race to Biden.
Spoiler Alert
But Kennedy’s real plan, we believe, is to spoil the fun for both of them. According to an analysis done by our friend, David Stockman, he might even win... but not by getting more votes. The only way possible for Kennedy to win is by opening the same ‘trap door’ to the White House used only once in US history, exactly 200 years ago by John Quincy Adams, another contender from a famous political family.
Here’s the situation. There are 15 “Blue Wall” states that aren’t going to be moved from the Biden camp — WA, OR, CA, CO, IL, MD, NJ, DE, RI, CT, MA, NY, VT, HI, DC.
And there are 20 “Red Wall” states that are solidly pro-Trump: AK, AR, ID, IN, KS, KY, LA, MS, MO, MT, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY.
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the race. To get that many, Biden and Trump must each take votes from the remaining 16 ‘swing states’ — AZ, GA, NV, NH, NM, WI, ME, NE, MN, IA, MI, OH, PA, VA, NC, FL. Between them, those states have 188 electoral votes. So, even if Kennedy were to win all the remaining ‘swing’ states... he still wouldn’t have enough electoral college votes to win the White House.
What this means is that Kennedy cannot win in the normal way, by taking votes from Biden and/or Trump. All he can do is to try to prevent Biden or Trump from getting enough swing state votes to reach the winning number. Logically, Kennedy should emphasize his “conservative” positions in those states most likely to go for Trump... and his “liberal” positions where the votes are more likely to shift to Biden…taking enough votes from each of them to deny them victory.
Not easy to do. But if no candidate gets 270 electoral votes, the race goes to the House of Representatives, as it did in 1824. There, each state delegation gets a single vote; it is not proportional to population. And there, the anti-Trump delegations may never agree to another Orange Man term... and the anti-Biden factions may never agree to let the president remain in office for another four years.
That would leave only one candidate on whom both sides might compromise: Robert Kennedy.
Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Desirable?
Stockman concludes:
As a practical matter, the only route to that end is a hung jury in the Electoral College, thereby paving the way for an epochal deal in the U.S House of Representatives. That is, a grand bargain that would enable a Kennedy presidency to dismantle the Empire and return America’s cratering fiscal affairs to some semblance of sustainable order.
More to come...
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Apparently Bill's myopic side is overshadowing his pragmatic one. Kennedy is nothing but a tax and spend liberal. His climate change fanaticism won't cut a single dollar from the federal budget, and in fact, he'd spend even more trying to lower the Earth's temperature by a degree or two.
As many of us preach on here every day, the Rubicon has been crossed and now it's a matter of taking steps to preserve what we've saved for ourselves and our offspring. No politician is going to help us with anything because they're only in the game to help themselves-period.
I believe Mark Twain got it right. They are not going to give up power, not at this juncture, not at this stage in the course of history. The 2020 coup succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. National elections are now Selections, and the centrality of the Vote and the Voter has been replaced by the centrality of the ballot and all the machinations and theatrics of a fake election. Anyone paying attention knows this. They know what happens to 80 million unsolicited mail-in ballots, they know what happens(as was so well documented in 2,000 Mules) when ballot drop boxes are placed in every major city, they know about the voting machines, that they were all connected to the internet, that the software is opaque and demonstrably corrupted, that precincts closed and then reopened in the wee hours to finish the job. Has all thus evaporated, gone away to never return to electoral politics in America? It would be absurd to think so. It would be rediculous if not absurd to believe that every single one of these tactics has not been strengthened and even supplemented for 2024. Ask yourself this: Who is going to stop them? Why is this so very obvious and yet has so stubbornly remained hidden in plain sight for nearly 4 years. There is a blindness which even mud and spit cannot cure.