One lesson that can be drawn from the second Trump administration is that being a member of the Kennedy family does not qualify you for public service. Yet many Camelot-besotted Democrats remain stubbornly immune to this conclusion.
One of them appears to be Nancy Pelosi, the normally shrewd former House speaker, who reportedly plans to endorse Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, for an open seat in New York’s Twelfth Congressional District.
“This moment calls for leaders who understand the stakes and how to deliver for the people they serve,” Pelosi said in a statement viewed by The New York Times before its release.
How that describes Schlossberg, a 33-year-old social-media personality, is difficult to understand. As a Kennedy, Schlossberg has been a lifelong celebrity in the traditional definition of the word—a person who is famous for being famous. He’s been profiled in Town & Country, on the Today show, in The Washington Post, and in The New York Times. The theme of this coverage is that Schlossberg (1) is a Kennedy, (2) is handsome, and (3) posts lots of edgy content on social media. To suggest that he has failed upward would give him too much credit because failing requires having been entrusted with some responsibility in the first place.
Schlossberg’s most important role to date came when Vogue hired him to write about the presidential campaign. At the time, it was widely seen as a stunt hire for which he was out of his depth. “Is he qualified to be a political correspondent?,” asked a New York Times story reporting on the hire.
His written output has not put those doubts to rest. Schlossberg’s oeuvre at Vogue is indistinguishable either in content or in style from something that could have been produced by an adequately trained high-school student. A representative passage from his campaign coverage:
The first live TV debate was in 1960, when JFK’s winning smile and Florida tan outshined Nixon’s sweaty 5 o’clock shadow. It was an instant hit—since then, live TV debates have spread to democracies around the world. Nothin’ better than watching people fight, don’t you think?
And:
Same as ever, this election will be decided by turnout in specific places. Specifically, voters in a handful of swing states—Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia—will decide our future.
It was utterly banal, but at least there wasn’t much of it. He wrote just seven short, insight-free columns. Nobody reading these pieces sans byline would have suspected they were catching a glimpse of a future leader of the country. Even if he had produced a body of penetrating analysis, it would hardly prepare him for national office. Yet Schlossberg now stands a plausible, perhaps strong, chance of winning the Democratic primary (and thus the general election).
New York’s Twelfth, in the heart of Manhattan, probably has more Democrats qualified to serve in national leadership than any congressional district in America. Accordingly, the list of potential candidates is already in the double digits. The winner, by dint of representing the nation’s media capital, is likely to have an outsize role in the national debate. The whole trick in this crowded field will be standing out. Schlossberg, by virtue of his attention-grabbing lineage and Pelosi’s endorsement, now has a giant advantage over a long list of genuinely accomplished rivals.
We don’t need to get too precious about the decline of standards in the House. Congress’s lower chamber has always contained its share of mediocrities. Although some House members use their position to develop expertise, legislate, or conduct oversight, the bare minimum for the job in both parties has always been to show up and vote the way the party leadership tells you, and refrain from saying or doing anything scandalous.
Perhaps Pelosi figures one of those seat warmers might as well be a Kennedy. And there certainly are some Kennedys up to the job of holding an overwhelmingly Democratic congressional district.
The trouble is that although Democrats like Pelosi apparently continue to see membership in the Kennedy clan, symbolized by the martyred president and his would-have-been-president brother, as a positive signal of judgment and reliability, it is in fact a strongly negative one. As Josh Barro argued two and a half years ago, a disquieting number of Kennedy men have injured or killed their romantic partners or themselves out of drunkenness and stupidity. Ted Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy II, respectively, killed and paralyzed a female passenger in a car crash. Michael Kennedy died playing football while skiing—two sports the Kennedys apparently decided to combine as a kind of tradition—after having endured a scandalous affair with the family babysitter, whom he claimed was 16 years old when they began having sex. Michael Skakel was convicted of killing Martha Moxley, but freed from prison after a court deemed his lawyer incompetent. The Kennedys are victims not only of misfortune, but also their own bad judgment.
Several Kennedys have served honorably and without scandal. But if you had to pick as your member of Congress a Kennedy male or a random person living in the district, you’re probably safer with the latter.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is bad in ways both characterological and ideological that many Democrats failed to fully recognize until he endorsed Trump and joined his administration, where he has unleashed a generational catastrophe in public health. His legacy in this field is arguably more consequential than the entire Kennedy presidency, which accomplished precious little.
Instead of snapping Democrats out of their Kennedy trance, RFK Jr.’s defection to the Republican Party stung Democrats into redoubling their commitment to reclaim their Kennedy birthright. Schlossberg spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2024 as JFK’s grandson, the implicit message of his speech being that Kennedy followers ought to listen to Democrats, as true heirs to Camelot, rather than the pretender, RFK Jr. The transcript of this speech is actually one of the seven contributions on Schlossberg’s Vogue author page.
In a better world, the realization that RFK Jr. is a crank and moral cretin would have liberated Democrats from their fixation with the Kennedy mythos. The grief over the assassinations of JFK and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. inspired the party to search again and again for heirs to the throne, a practice that resolved into decades of affirmative action for their decreasingly talented offspring.
The Democratic Party is divided between a wing that holds “No Kings” rallies and a wing that holds anti-oligarchy rallies. Perhaps one thing both can agree on is that the party doesn’t need its own royal family.
