OPINION:
There’s a political cartoon going around that shows John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy sitting on a couch watching a speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The two hold their palms to their heads and moan that their legacy is being twisted and ruined.
This has the situation completely backward. It is not Mr. Kennedy who is rejecting the his uncle’s and his father’s legacy, but President Biden and other modern-day Democrats.
It’s been said many times — and it happens to be true — that if President Kennedy were alive today and espousing the ideas of his 1,000 days in the Oval Office, he would be a Republican. John F. Kennedy was a staunch Cold War anti-communist and anti-socialist. He espoused lower tax rates, he was pro-life, he served our country in uniform, he was patriotic, and he was a hawk on protecting First Amendment civil liberties. He and his brother Robert, who served as his attorney general and in the Senate, took on union and government corruption.
Not many Democratic leaders today check any of these boxes.
This is why the left has come to detest Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is an inconvenient candidate who is exposing the Democrats’ identity crisis. The party leaders today denounce him for espousing what were mainstream Democratic values 60 years ago. The Democratic National Committee effectively booted him from the party for this apostasy. Now they’re terrified that a good many Democratic voters who long for the party of old may splinter off.
This is exactly the point Mr. Kennedy is making when he campaigns around the country as an independent: “I’m a traditional Democrat, and … part of my mission here is to summon the Democratic Party back to its traditional ideals,” he says.
Sadly, that party is gone with the wind. Mr. Kennedy sounds a bit like President Ronald Reagan, who famously said as a Republican candidate in 1980: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left me.”
On no issue have Democrats reversed themselves more completely than on the role of tax cuts to promote growth and economic stimulus.
It was President Kennedy who famously said, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low, and the surest way to raise the revenues is to cut the rates now.”
When I met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a few weeks ago, he told me: “I learned from my uncle that tax rate cuts incentivize growth.” President Kennedy cut tax rates by 30%, and almost all Democrats back then supported the measure. The economy and revenue exploded. The rich paid more, not less.
Today, President Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want to raise tax rates to 50%, 60% and 70%, not reduce them. That would blow up the economy.
I don’t agree with some of Mr. Kennedy’s environmental positions and some of his odd conspiracy theories, but you have to admire his courage in calling out Democrats who have fled from their party’s traditional values. He is right on at least half the issues, which puts him way ahead of most Democrats in Washington today.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and chief economist with FreedomWorks. He is the author of ”Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”
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