A person is a president; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the candidate’s right to privacy

Candidates forfeit their right to privacy on announcing a serious bid for the presidency. This is not to say that a candidate must immediately disclose everything that’s ever happened to them. They maintain the right to try and keep secret whatever skeletons are filling up their closet, but that right is simply a right to try.

Image courtesy of Wix

And not all their skeletons will be shared by personal friends or uncovered by journalists over the course of their campaign. But those that do are fair game. Whatever bits of true humanity we get about candidates are essential to the game.

This is because the personal lives of presidents are as important as their policy positions. The character of a person tells us at least as much about their prospective presidency as their official platform. I care about Harris and Trump’s differing views on tax and tariff policy, sure, but that’s not really why I’ll vote the way I do in November. I’ll vote based on how I think these people will respond in crisis. I’ll vote based on which person I think better reflects the American disposition: optimistic, hard-working, and imperfect.

Anybody can run for president, but very few people can win. Only the most exceptional among us, the most consistently leader-like, should even sniff the office. And despite an expected element of imperfection, it’s fair to demand that our very best have fewer skeletons in their closet than you or me, or at least that the bones be more understandable.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s recent bid for the presidency serves as a parable for this point, and the moral is clear: know who you are. For Kennedy, that is not a president.

Most Americans would today agree that Kennedy isn’t fit for the presidency. It’s so clear to everybody, in fact, that he’s already dropped out of the race. But there was a moment, about six months ago, where real momentum felt possible for a Kennedy presidency in 2024. He was polling around 10%.  

And this performance, one of the most impressive by an independent candidate in modern American history, was despite a truly absurd platform. Democrat Kennedy supporters saw him as the most progressive choice since Bernie Sanders; Republican supporters saw him as an all-American man ready to reel in the wokeness. All the rest of us just saw a candidate somehow appealing to every one of America’s fringes.

It’s not possible to pin Kennedy down on a political compass, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it represented some kind of authenticity. But Kennedy is a former environmental lawyer who suddenly wanted to “put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain,” a burgeoning technology which already accounted for 2% of the globe’s electricity consumption in 2022. It was all just confusing, convoluted even.

More clearly reprehensible, though, is Kennedy’s long-known disbelief in vaccines. It’s a set of beliefs that goes past even a lack of faith; it veers into conspiratorial thinking. Kennedy publicly and seriously believes that the American medical institution knowingly gives millions of children autism every year. It’s frightening, the thought of an American president so far out on the fringes.

But all this public, seemingly intentional insanity and more were not enough to dissuade the American public from at least a vague interest in his presidency. So, what did it?

Kennedy’s personal life. It was the dead bears and the brain worms and the affairs and the strange animal roastings which finally got him to rescind his candidacy. It took the press holding a mirror up to Kennedy for him to see who he is: a shapeshifter, a grifter, and a man with too many skeletons in his closet.

Every president has secrets. George W. Bush got a DUI in 1976. Barack Obama smoked cigarettes. These are human flaws. They’re understandable to the American public, even humanizing in the right light.

RFK, Jr.’s secrets were more like that of a billionaire playboy, which makes sense given his upbringing, professional career, and later life. We should all be thankful that members of the press thought to ask about that bear in Central Park or his sexual assault allegations, providing an opportunity for him to explain that he “isn’t a church boy.” Because of these probes into the candidate’s private life, Americans finally had the data on Kennedy to realize that he isn’t like the rest of us.