Spoiler Sports
This was the week for political red herrings, both nationally and in the Bay Area
Tuesday was a great day for political frustration in the Bay Area as fringe presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his running mate at a rally held at the Kaiser Center in Oakland.
The Codependent Candidacy
Kennedy’s mid-morning event certainly ticked all the crunchy boxes. It began with a benediction from Charlene Nijmeh, chair of the currently unrecognized Mukwema Ohlone tribe, whose ruling council has endorsed Kennedy. The tribe’s controversial and fractious struggle for recognition, well documented by the Chronicle, in some respects, parallels his candidacy—- one that projects an intense thirst for recognition by a political establishment it openly scorns, a veneer of authenticity worn as a chip on one’s shoulder.
That could also be said for Kennedy’s pick as running mate, tech entrepreneur, and mega-donor Nicole Shanahan, whose reveal was the rally’s main event.
“We can’t stand the phoniness anymore,” she said at the high point of her speech at Tuesday’s rally.
Shanahan’s reveal was spoiled by a great deal of chatter in the preceding days, fueled mainly by purchasing a Super Bowl ad for Kennedy’s campaign.
Shanahan’s appearance was preceded by an introductory video where, among other things, she attributed widespread pediatric chronic disease “that is devouring our nation from inside” to what she called “environmental disruptors,” ranging from food preservatives to microplastics, including “environmental exposures electrochemical in nature” from wireless technologies.
Generally, Shanahan’s introduction reinforced her image as a booster of fringe health theories and a vaguely progressive politics that permeates junior college Poli Sci discussions. It crystallizes the post-covid phase of self-actualization-driven politics, appealing to an aggressively vegan, neti-pot-using, cold-plunging, wellness-blogger-reading, mandolin-playing crowd of primarily white boomers driven by a willingly uninformed strain of ressentiment. It’s as if James Carville’s most recent worst fears have been made real, but instead of sticking with Biden, these progressive fringes have found their matched pair of avatars.
Shanahan packages it all in a mien of appropriated coolness from the Holden Caufield playbook, tinged with a vulnerability that recalls Sally Field’s “You Like Me!” speech at the 1985 Oscars. Its appeal to an ersatz authenticity is the flipside of the hyperaggressive paranoia that fires up the MAGA crowd.
The Kennedy/Shanahan ticket, assuming it gets on the ballot in enough states, certainly has the potential to shave off some Biden votes. That campaign is already responding by pointing out the obvious: Shanahan bought her way in, basically rescuing a broke campaign.
Ultimately, Kennedy’s ticket and its politics resemble a pack of a particular brand of cigarettes your favorite rebel used to smoke in junior college: they may be organic, but they’re still bad for you.