One day apart, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his presidential campaign, and Jeff Apodaca defended The New Mexico Project in court. 

The scions of two political families are very different personally, but both have struggled to carve out their place in public life. Both stepped outside the inherited cocoon of the Democratic Party and attempted to cut a path through the political jungle on their own.

Kennedy at his core is a tragic figure. At 14 he saw his father killed on national TV. He wasn’t close to his mother, a widow with 11 children. He criticized investigations of his father’s and uncle’s assassinations and embraced conspiracy theories. He enjoyed successes at Harvard and as an environmentalist, but he was given to depression and the constant sense that there was a hole in his life, which he tried to fill with drugs and women, according to media accounts.   

A friend once said Kennedy always wanted to run for president but assumed his reckless behavior would rule that out. Enter Donald Trump. Kennedy admitted to an interviewer that Trump’s candidacy enlarged his concept of what was possible. And Kennedy had found a vehicle in his opposition to vaccines, which got more play during the COVID years, despite the opposition of doctors, scientists and his own family.

Pundits usually described Kennedy’s campaign as quixotic, but a few were also surprised that he polled better than expected. 

Meanwhile, Apodaca, our home-grown scion, is doing battle with the state Ethics Commission.

Apodaca is a somewhat tragic figure. Son of the late Gov. Jerry Apodaca and the well-regarded Clara Apodaca, he played football in high school and college but had to overcome cancer at age 17. He graduated in 1986 with a B.A. in broadcast management and had a successful 30-year career in the media, rising to executive positions at CBS, Univision and others.

Apodaca could have retired and enjoyed himself, but he wanted a second chapter in his life and yielded to the political itch. He ran for governor in 2018 as a Democrat but was no match for Michelle Lujan Grisham. Nobody called his campaign quixotic, but one columnist called him a “featherweight.” In his campaign rhetoric Apodaca annoyed and offended Dems, although maybe not as much as Kennedy.

A few months ago I wrote about Apodaca’s idea of raising money to support moderates of both parties through The New Mexico Project. Because Democrats were then persecuting their moderates, I thought Apodaca hit on a good idea. 

He ran afoul of transparency watchdogs like New Mexico In Depth, which called the project another dark money group and pushed the project to report campaign donations. The state Ethics Commission sued to force the project to disclose sources of funding that bought political ads supporting legislative candidates in the primary.

Lately, reported the Albuquerque Journal, Apodaca blamed Democratic progressives for “weaponizing” the Ethics Commission. That’s starting to be an old accusation. Lawmakers worried when they created the commission that it could be used politically, so they tried to protect the accused and give them the benefit of the doubt, among other protections. 

Apodaca insists the project is an education group. On the radio he said that “we’re going in and educating the voters on what we need to do to get out and vote and vote for the right candidates.” Sound like a political campaign?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Then there’s Source New Mexico’s report about Apodaca accelerating a truck through pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration. Nobody was hurt, but it was another hit on his reputation.

Something Apodaca and Kennedy share, besides fringe candidacies, is a wacky edge. Apodaca can back away from that edge if he chooses. For Kennedy, it’s a little late.