Leubsdorf: RFK Jr. running on name

But Democrats fear he could help Trump by attracting votes in battleground states that might otherwise be for President Joe Biden. They jumped on a statement by Rita Palma, a New York Kennedy operative, that her “No. 1 priority” was to “get rid of Biden.”

Though now an independent, Kennedy is culturally a Democrat though his candidacy has turned off most members of his fabled political clan, who back Biden.

He also may be helping Trump by calling Biden a greater danger to democracy than the former president, who sought to overturn the legitimate 2020 results.

But Kennedy also worries Trump’s strategists when he echoes the claim that “political objectives motivated the vigor of the prosecution” of the pro-Trump mob that overran the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

He also sounds like Trump when he explains why he is running.

“I can fix this country,” he said in Las Vegas in February. “All these agencies that intimidate normal politicians, I’ve sued every one of them.”

In fact, Kennedy is basically an alternative for disaffected members of both parties: Republicans who like Trump’s anti-government rhetoric and disdain for the Ukraine war and older Catholic Democrats who revere the Kennedy name.

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote, “Kennedy attracts many of the same sort of alienated political eccentrics who in the past have gravitated to Trump.” Current polls show he marginally helps Trump.

His potential voter pool suggests he must simultaneously appeal to groups with opposite views, a tricky feat. And, like many neophyte candidates, he has encountered difficulty in explaining his positions, as scrutiny increases.

That has been evident in his series of muddled comments about Jan. 6.

He has decried what he called the Democrats’ “obsession” with it, and his campaign said in a recent fundraising appeal that the Jan. 6 defendants were “activists” who had been “stripped of their constitutional liberties,” a missive his campaign promptly disavowed as an error by a new marketing contractor.

In a follow-up statement, he seemed to seek a middle ground.

It is “clear,” he said, that many people broke the law on Jan. 6. But he blamed “political objectives” for “their long sentences, and their harsh treatment.” He repeated an inaccurate claim the rioters “carried no weapons,” then retracted it three hours later.

A Trump vote is understandable for religious conservatives who think the most important thing is naming Supreme Court justices or rich people focused mainly on tax breaks.

And a Biden vote is logical to maintain an American role overseas and a compassionate government at home.

But the only reason to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is to avoid the real choice in the 2024 election.