When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on April 19, the party and incumbent president Joe Biden mostly pretended to not even notice.

Aside from a few lazy (but not always meritless) hit pieces on his positions (especially where vaccines are concerned) and public gaffes (COVID-19 something something Jews something) it mostly came down in implementation to a false belief we most often attribute to small children: If you can’t see it, it can’t see you, so try very hard not to see it.

That policy extended even to denying Secret Service protection to RFK Jr. — whose uncle and father were both assassinated in the 1960s —  even after what looked an awful lot like an assassination attempt in mid-September.

Republicans mostly assumed his campaign would weaken Biden and the Democrats next November, at least to the extent that he could get any attention.

But things change, and they’re changing now. A PAC associated with RFK Jr.’s campaign is polling on his possible strength as an independent, the New York Times reports that he met with the chair of the Libertarian Party’s national committee in July, and the candidate himself has scheduled an event with an “historic announcement” for October 9 in Philadelphia.

Suddenly, his visibility registers with both “major party” establishments as an emergency. As an independent or third party candidate, he’s a potential “spoiler” who may “cost” either Joe Biden or Donald Trump the 2024 presidential election.

I’m unsympathetic to “spoiler” whining in general, for two reasons.

First, your vote belongs to you, not to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s yours until you cast it for someone, and you owe it to no one.

Second, additional candidates making it harder on either or both of the “Big Two” is a feature, not a bug. When there are only two candidates, they each campaign to their respective “bases” while trying to swing a tiny sliver of “swing voters” who may not like either candidate very much but are constrained to pick one. A third option (or more) makes them work harder to EARN votes instead of just receiving them by default.

Both Democrats and Republicans are suddenly scared to death that RFK Jr. will knock down 5-10% of the vote in key states, upsetting the electoral vote apple cart. Good — they should be scared, and having them scared is better for all of us.

In my view, the Republicans should be more worried than the Democrats. RFK Jr.’s views on the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates are closer to those of Trump’s “base” than Trump’s actions as president were, and a significant percentage of that “base” may be single-issue voters in 2024.

On the other hand, if there’s any way for Biden to lose support from Democratic voters, it’s for someone named “Kennedy” to get assassinated on the campaign trail after the administration leaves him unprotected by the Secret Service.

Either way, while I do not support RFK Jr.’s candidacy, I think it’s good for America.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In June, Florida’s legislature passed (and governor Ron DeSantis signed) a bill transferring control of Gainesville Regional Utilities from the city’s government to the  state’s. In late September, a judge rejected the city’s lawsuit to prevent the takeover.

While that sounds like a localized controversy, it offers national implications and important lessons. We’ve seen similar situations play out in other locales.

When my family moved to the Gainesville area a decade ago, friends who already lived here warned us: “Don’t rent in town, and even  outside of town make sure you’re not in GRU’s coverage area.”

Households in that coverage area fork over a great deal more every month to keep their lights on than households in other Florida cities — and WAY more than households in areas served by rural electric cooperatives.

Anecdotally, a couple of years ago I compared electric bills with an acquaintance. That acquaintance was paying GRU about twice as much to electrify a small single-person household as I was paying Clay Electric (an REC) to light up a medium five-person household.

Over the years I’ve kept an eye on GRU’s arguments for its ever-increasing prices. Here’s their two-step:

First: We can stop raising rates if we just annex more customers! Economies of scale will fix the problem!  The more kilowatt-hours we’re selling, the cheaper each kilowatt-hour becomes!

Then: We must raise rates again! We just annexed a bunch of new customers! New lines and new power generation facilities cost money!

Rinse, repeat.

Why can’t GRU deliver electricity at least as cheaply and efficiently to a compact urban area as Clay does to a much larger rural area where distances between customers are often measured in miles rather than meters?

Well, Clay is owned by its members/customers, while GRU is “owned” by politicians who use it as three things: A cash cow for the city, a kid’s chemistry set for experimenting with novel power generation methods (including a $1.2 billion “biomass” experiment), and an excuse to bring surrounding areas under their control.

While it’s true that rural electric cooperatives were, like municipal utilities, created by governments, not all “non-profits” are created equal. RECs answer directly to their customers. Municipal utilities answer to politicians who use them as … well, tax collectors.

But the answer to the bigger problem, I think, isn’t so much a matter of RECs versus municipal utilities versus “private” utilities, but in competition on both price and service.

Even if we concede (I don’t) that power LINES are “natural monopolies,” these days all those lines are tied together in sprawling “grids.” There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t each be able to choose our electricity provider, with providers serving particular areas splitting line maintenance costs. That’s been done in, for example, Texas.

I’d love to see us get away from “grids” and to far more localized (ideally, single-household via e.g. rooftop solar) power generation and delivery. But until we can do that, freeing hostages from utility monopolies should rank near the top of our energy priorities.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

I’m neither a fan nor a supporter of Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the also-rans who’s made it to the “debate” phase of auditions for the vice-presidency or a cabinet slot in a notional second Donald Trump administration. For the most part, neither his ideas nor his presentation impress me. But his demeanor has a way of usefully baiting the other candidates into showing us who they really are.

The big reveal at the second “debate” — scare quotes because these events aren’t really debates, they’re just illegally large advertising donations that the Federal Election Commission turns a blind eye to — came from former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who’s been having a moment as just maybe, possibly, an eensy teensy bit, more likely than Florida governor Ron DeSantis to notch a distant second place to Trump in the GOP presidential primaries.

“TikTok,” Haley informed America by way of scolding Ramaswamy for setting up a campaign account on it, “is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have. … 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get text messages, they can get all of these things. … You are now wanting kids to go and get on this social media that’s dangerous for all of us.”

In the middle of all this, Haley let loose with what was, I suppose, intended as the zinger: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”

Every time Haley speaks, she sounds a little bit dumber, but I doubt that’s Ramaswamy’s fault.

Nor is it Ramaswamy’s fault that she comes off as unhinged on the level of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the fictional character who engineers a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for “corrupting” his “precious bodily fluids” in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove.

Is it possible that the Chinese regime gains access to American users’ data via TikTok? Of course it is. We already know that the US regime gains access to the data of Americans, and foreigners, via their use of apps and platforms domiciled in the US. We know this because American hero Edward Snowden told us all about it nearly a decade ago.

Interestingly, Vivek Ramaswamy has pledged to “pardon” Snowden — currently exiled to Russia — for his non-crimes, one of his few truly attractive promises. Haley hasn’t.

It’s possible that Haley’s shrill and bellicose presentation is for real. Or maybe it’s just an act, a woman going over the top to prove that she’d be just as cluelessly belligerent in the Oval Office as any man.

Either way, voters shouldn’t allow her within 100 miles of the nuclear “football.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY