Biden’s exit leaves no room for scammers

I’m still thinking about the upsides to the president’s historic decision to drop out of the running. This morning, it’s third parties, particularly the campaign of “independent candidate” Robert F Kennedy Jr.

As long The Narrative was in place, according to which “undecided” voters were being forced to choose between two options they didn’t like, he was able to draw as much as 10 percent of the vote, per 538.

That was always concerning. If Kennedy drew as little as 1 percent, as third parties did in 2016, that could be enough for the criminal former president to win an election as tight as this one. Robert F Kennedy Jr has always been a joke, but some jokes are never going to be funny.

Now that The Narrative is being rewritten, however, things look different. People who had been looking hard for alternatives aren’t looking so hard. Many of them don’t like Joe Biden but hate Trump. Now that Biden is out, and now that his party has instantaneously unified around Vice President Kamala Harris, many will move to her.

There’s another angle. As long as The Narrative was in place, Trump didn’t have to worry too much. Yes, Kennedy could and probably would pull some voters away from him, but he would probably pull more voters away from the president. As long as “undecideds” could not decide, Kennedy was more asset than liability to Trump. But, again, now that The Narrative is being rewritten, he’s likely to start worrying.

For both reasons, he’s “nowhere to be seen,” according toPolitico.

“Instead of campaigning, [Kennedy] has canceled multiple campaign events and discussed dropping out of the race and backing Trump,” it said. “Instead of raising serious donations, he’s continuing to rely on his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and set up a joint fundraising committee with the Libertarian Party. Instead of moving up in the polls, where he’s been stagnant for months, Kennedy has called for himself to be picked as the Democratic nominee to replace Biden.”

That part is worth dwelling on. “Kennedy has called for himself to be picked as the Democratic nominee to replace Biden.” That was never a possibility, not even remotely. Moreover, Kennedy – the son of Robert F Kennedy, the assassinated brother of assassinated President John F Kennedy, and scion of one of America’s political dynasties – knows it.

He knows he will never be the Democratic nominee, just as he knows he will never win a presidential election outside a two-party system he knows very well. And yet he still calls himself a viable replacement for Biden and he still calls himself a viable alternative for undecided voters. He knows what he’s saying isn’t true but he says it anyway.

He's a scammer.

It’s because he’s a scammer, not because he’s something noble-sounding like an “independent candidate,” that he’s still a threat.

Unless he remains “nowhere to be seen.”

Third parties can’t win, and we know they can’t win, because they never win. The last and only time they did was in 1860 when the country was on the brink of civil war. Every president since then has been a Democrat or a Republican, and the reason for that is fairly straightforward. Our system of politics has room for only two. (I haven’t mentioned the added complication of the Electoral College. In the United States, people don’t really vote for president. States do.)

If we had a proportional system, that would be different. A candidate who wins 50 percent plus one would still have to bargain with candidates who split the difference. The winner would have to form a government, as they do in Israel and the United Kingdom. Those countries have multiple parties, because they canhave them.

America is a winner-take-all system. A candidate who wins 50 percent plus one wins everything. Losers get nothing. Given this fundamental fact, there are not enough resources for two viable parties. Kennedy says he can win if enough people vote for him. But that’s like saying I can fly if I can flap my arms fast enough. He knows this fundamental fact better than most people. He may be crazy but he’s not stupid.

But it isn’t just lies and the lying liars who tell them that dupe people into believing third parties are viable. Scammers can’t make anyone believe anything they don’t already believe. And because we live in a capitalist society in which the only truly sacred thing is the exchange of goods and services for money, we tend to believe we, the people, have a right to get exactly what we want in exchange for our votes.

I could be wrong, but this customer-service approach to politics is why we’re talking about scammers like Robert F Kennedy Jr. That is to say, without it, we wouldn’t be talking about him at all. Instead, we would have seen the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump as simple. One of them is a sandwich that, to be sure, you might not prefer, because you like ham more than turkey, but the other is a shit sandwich. It tastes like shit, because it is shit, and you don’t eat shit.

While I believe this customer-service approach is childish, I also believe I will never win the argument. Americans are just too conditioned to think of themselves as consumers. Try as I might – try as we all might – there was probably no way of getting “undecideds” to see themselves as grown-up citizens capable of making grown-up decisions. As long as The Narrative was in place, as long as they saw themselves as making a choice they didn’t want to make, a scammer like Kennedy was always going to be standing by, waiting to scam.

But now that The Narrative is being rewritten, and now that the parties are unified behind their respective nominees, things are different. There’s suddenly no more room for scammers. That Kennedy is making no secret of his support for Trump – or of his interest in a job in his second administration and his need for help in paying debts – is the proof. There’s no point in running a scam when the marks are not paying attention anymore. And they are not paying attention like they used to, because Biden decided to drop out of the running.