These days, the phrase “Kennedy voter” means different things to different members of Burke Cahill’s family.Cahill, 50, is a formerly reliable Democratic voter who was alienated by what he sees as a leftward drift into policies he can’t abide — like a Covid-19 vaccine mandate that almost cost him his firefighting job. On Tuesday, he got up early, driving nearly two hours from the Sacramento area to Oakland, just so he could witness — in person — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing his running mate. (That would be attorney/philanthropist/documentary producer/fellow former Democrat Nicole Shanahan.) As Cahill sees it, Kennedy’s fierce independence from a sclerotic two-party system is just what the country needs.
Kennedy, he tells me as he heads into a rally for RFK Jr., has what it takes to heal the partisan wounds bedeviling the nation.His relatives, on the other hand, aren’t convinced. To the contrary. The Cahills are distantly related to the Kennedys and Cahill says he “grew up holding the Kennedy family as royalty.” His embrace of a RFK Jr., a passionate anti-vaxxer at odds with his own family, has opened a rift.“They’re old-school Democrats, and they think they’re being loyal,” Cahill says of his family. “This can’t even be talked about without it being contentious.”That estrangement mirrors a deeper divergence on display in the proudly liberal East Bay, particularly on this sunny Tuesday in Oakland. Several hundred fervent RFK Jr. fans, some decked out in Kennedy paraphernalia, gather at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts to show their support of RFK Jr., and where, just outside, another dozen or so folks — some sporting “Kennedy for Measles” stickers — gather to show their contempt of him.
For decades, the Kennedy name was synonymous with a mainstream strain of civic optimism that preached public service and a beneficent government. It enthralled aspiring Democratic politicians like California Governor and avowed Kennedy admirer Gavin Newsom. But that was a different era, when a different kind of Kennedy could be seen running for the highest office in the land — and when more Americans had faith in their government. Today, RFK Jr.’s supporters tend to place a corrupt government at the root of America’s ills. They ask not what their government can do for them but what it has done to them.