Meet Joe Kennedy, the Democrat Taking on Trump
The State of the Union rebuttal, once a platform for the minority party to showcase its best and brightest, has, after a series of prime-time bellyflops, become a somewhat less desirable gig for rising stars. People even say it's cursed.
Luckily, the man tapped to give the Democrats' official response, a Kennedy who has achieved Internet fame for his passionate defenses of the Affordable Care Act, has had to become comfortable with both viral stardom and the threat of a curse. Representative Joe Kennedy III – son of six-term Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy, nephew of Ted Kennedy, grandson of Robert F. Kennedy and grand-nephew of JFK – will deliver the Democrats official response from a vocational school in Fall River, Massachusetts. (Unofficial responses will also be delivered by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman, and Representative Maxine Waters.)
Rolling Stone caught up with the 37-year-old political scion the morning of his big speech to hear how he was readying to go after Trump.
Big night tonight! How are you preparing?
My two-year-old, I think, was excited for this speech – she's been up since two in the morning. That's been really helpful. So, it's going to be whatever it was before plus a whole lot of coffee!
I'm home, which is obviously nice. I'm with my family, and still going over the speech and doing some fine tuning to it, and hopefully we'll get over to the venue and do a dry run there, then just relax a bit. Hopefully take a nap at some point.
You're speaking from a vocational school in your district – how did you pick this spot?
Most of these have been done from an office space in the Washington. It's a hard speech to give anyway, but it's particularly hard to give in that format. There's no way anybody is going to meet the [pomp and] circumstance of the State of the Union, and the chamber of the House of Representatives with a thousand people in the audience. But you don't have to do it in Washington – you can do it basically anywhere else you wanted to and I wanted to be able to give it from someplace in my district, in the community that I represent.
Why you got into politics, apart from the obvious?
I grew up around it, obviously. My dad was in office for six terms, and I had plenty of relatives that were around it. It was something that I was always interested in, but I didn't necessarily think I'd be doing it at a relatively young age. (I got into office in my early thirties.) It was bit of a circuitous route – I was an engineering management major and I wasn't quite ready to take a desk job right out of school. So, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic for about two and half years, and I worked in a community with a group of young men who were guides for a beautiful series of waterfalls that formed 27 natural waterfall cliff jumps. But the guys were getting really taken advantage of by these big international tour companies. I was able to work with them and the government to get these guys more legal rights and create an economic model that gave them a fair wage and reinvested a bunch of proceeds into preserving the park and creating it as an economic engine for the community.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/meet-joe-kennedy-democrat-taking-on-trump-w516139?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=013018_17
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