During recent remarks to the press at the Iowa State Fair, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stressed the importance of primary debates —especially during a time when Americans are skeptical of the integrity of the system.
“Part of having a democracy is that the public, actually the rank and file of the Democratic Party, the public gets to pick the candidate,” Kennedy said Tuesday, reports Forbes. “The best way to pick them is to have debates and to have town halls [and] to have to do retail politics.”
This means facing the press and the public, added Kennedy, “because otherwise, we have politicians who are living inside a bubble, and the only people they’re talking to are the billionaires who are writing the checks.”
“I see what’s happening in the American heartland,” said Kennedy. “I see the desperation, the mental illness. We’ve never seen anything like this before, the epidemics of opioids … the epidemics of alcoholism, of depression, drug abuse.”
Americans are also being “crushed by” debt, and it’s important to speak with them, including “going to kitchen tables,” said Kennedy.
“It’s very easy for politicians to sit in a big mansion in Washington, D.C., and forget about the rest of the country,” he told the reporters. “I don’t think that’s good for our democracy.”
According to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University pol, 80% of Democrat primary voters want to see a debate between President Joe Biden and his opponents, Kennedy and author Marianne Williamson.