Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president today, and headed out to campaign for her in Iowa — a state where he once told residents, “large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.”
Mr. Kennedy, a fellow New Yorker, is a longtime environmental lawyer and the chairman of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit that supports global clean water programs.
According to news accounts at the time, in April 2002, in the Des Moines Register and the New York Post, Mr. Kennedy made the comparison during a Waterkeeper rally in Iowa on hog farm issues. The group has long raised concerns about the environmental fall-out from large-scale animal raising enterprises.
A Register editorial denounced his comments as “idiotic” and “ridiculous,” and the paper’s leading political columnist, David Yepsen — who Mrs. Clinton and other candidates now eagerly court — said that Mr. Kennedy’s comments were “one of the crudest things ever said in Iowa politics.”
A Clinton campaign spokesman, Phil Singer, said yesterday, “We aren’t going to agree with everything that every one of our supporters has said.”
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/rfk-jr-endorses-clinton/