Dem
51
GOP
49
In case you have forgotten, Cornel West sees himself sitting in the big chair in the White House commanding the troops or throwing ketchup against the wall or doing whatever people do in that chair. So naturally he is campaigning by telling everyone why he is better than Joe Biden and Donald Trump, right? Wrong. He is too busy denouncing leading candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for something Kennedy's uncle and father did some 60 years ago. Way to go, Cornel. The voters can't wait to hear who's next on your list.
The big issue is the wiretap the Kennedy administration placed on Martin Luther King Jr. RFK Jr.'s father was attorney general at the time and his uncle was president. RFK fils was in short pants, about 8 years old then. West said: "RFK Jr. has to realize that this is not a question of some kind of institutional arrangement between his father and uncle and the FBI—no, no. They declared war on my people." Kennedy said that there was "a good reason for them doing that at that time." The Kennedy brothers believed that one of King's close advisers, Stanley Levison, who helped King raise funds for the Montgomery bus boycott, was a communist. Kennedy added: "My father gave permission to [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover to wiretap them so he could prove that his suspicions about King were either right or wrong."
By now, Hoover has been completely discredited and most historians believe that he indeed was trying to derail the Civil Rights Movement. Nevertheless, it's hard for us to see where attacking Kennedy family members, both living and dead, gets West votes. Maybe he sees his target audience as double haters who prefer Kennedy to him and he wants to convince them that they should switch to him on account of decisions Jack and Bobby made in 1963, by claiming that Jack and Bobby (especially) "declared war on his people."
Maybe West ought to check out the Wikipedia article on the Ole Miss riot of 1962. It describes how then-AG Bobby Kennedy led the battle to integrate the University of Mississippi by enrolling the first Black student, James Meredith, using the full power of the United States government and 31,000 federal troops to force then-Mississippi governor Ross Barnett to admit Meredith against the governor's will. This was the first time federal troops were used to desegregate any educational institution in Mississippi. This move broke the back of the Southern resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. From then on, it became clear to Southerners that the Kennedy brothers were prepared to use massive force to defend the rights of Black Americans. (V)