The Wild Reed: More Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Run

Friday, March 24, 2023

More Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Run

Author and activist Marianne Williamson continues her challenging of Joe Biden to be the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. In doing so, she’s made some impressive appearances on various news and current affairs shows. Her candidacy has also generated a number of informed and insightful commentaries, even as the mainstream media largely avoids any in-depth analysis of her presidential bid.

Following is a second compilation of progressive perspectives on Marianne’s 2024 presidential run. (For the first compilation, click here.)

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Marianne Williamson’s policy platform is similar to that of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two candidates she ran against in the 2020 [Democratic presidential] primary. For those on the left of the party in 2020, there was little reason to vote for Marianne Williamson – two sitting Senators were running on virtually the same ideas, and one of them, Sanders, spent the early days of the race as a frontrunner. As it currently stands for the 2024 primary, voters particularly energized by ideas such as Medicare For All and free tuition at state colleges, universities, and trade schools have only one candidate to turn to – Marianne Williamson. Bernie isn’t running and has said he would support Biden if the President seeks re-election, which he is widely expected to do by everyone, including the First Lady. However, Sanders, unlike other Democrats, has not dismissed Williamson. He told Insider, “I know Marianne. I’m sure that she’s going to run a strong campaign and raise very important issues,” and refused to speculate on her chances.

Bernie might know Marianne, but most Americans don’t. Getting herself in front of voters will be Williamson’s biggest challenge. If she can manage to do it, she’s bound to intrigue, as her own political history has shown: after the first Democratic debate in 2020, Williamson was the most Googled candidate – no small feat in a crowded stage of ten. When Williamson is speaking, it’s difficult to look away. Although a prolific and best-selling author, she has made her living off speaking – not to bankers or journalists – but to the regular men and women who pay to attend her seminars. She speaks with a strange but melodic accent – a bit old Hollywood and a bit southern – and she knows how to face a camera. She exudes an explicitly feminine charisma which we often find in media and real life but rarely in politics.

. . . [Williamson’s] willingness to speak in explicitly moral and spiritual terms might elicit scoffs and eye rolls in Washington, but Washington is not America. This is a country where 81% of the population believes in God, and outside of Washington, few have reason to lie about it. American politics has always been driven by religious fervor, from the Great Awakening to Abolitionism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Moral Majority. The decline of regular Christian church attendance has not quelled this impulse.

. . . The dismissiveness showed toward Williamson by Democrats and much of the mainstream press on the basis of her outsider status – baffling, given that Trump barely left office two years ago – only gives her an opportunity to articulate the precise sentiment that attracted voters to Trump and, I believe, will attract voters to Williamson. Take her recent interview with ABCs Jonathan Karl. When Karl, who deployed an audibly patronizing tone throughout the interview, referred to the Associated Press’ description of Williamson as the “longest of long-shots,” Williamson shot back.

“I would bet that the Associated Press also said that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in.”

Jonathan Karl shifted uncomfortably in his chair, “Well, I don’t know if they would have used that language actually I dunno –”

Grinning, Marianne Williamson cut him off. “Maybe not. But that system. You know exactly what I’m saying. The system that is now saying I’m unserious, I’m not credible, or I’m a long shot, is the very system that protects and maintains this idea that only those whose careers have been entrenched within the system that drove us into a ditch should possibly be considered qualified to lead us out of that ditch. My qualification is not that I know how to participate in that system. My qualification is that I know how to disrupt it. And that is what we need right now.”

– River Page
Excerpted from “Biden Shouldn’t Blow Off Marianne Williamson”
Pirate Wires
March 14, 2023

Marianne Williamson interviwed by Gerren Keith – The Grio, March 23, 2023 (25 mins) . . .

Williamson’s policy platform, which is remarkably detailed for a candidate just beginning to hit the trail, combines a by-now-familiar list of progressive demands with some unique Williamsonian touches.

Williamson is running on enacting a single-payer health care system, paid family and parental leave, free child care, and tuition-free public college or vocational school, as well as banning the oil and gas extraction method known as fracking and speeding up clean-energy adoption targets.

She is also proposing the creation of a host of new federal agencies, including a Department of Climate Action and a Department of Childhood and Youth. And Williamson wants to provide at least $1 trillion in reparations to Black Americans that would be distributed by a council of Black American leaders.

. . . To call Williamson’s encore presidential run a long shot would be an understatement. Her first bid, conducted in the more accommodating conditions of an open primary field, ended in January 2020 before any votes were cast, and after months of dismal polling and fundraising that kept her off the [later] debate stage[s].

Now, she is the first and only candidate to challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden has not officially stated his plans to seek a second term, but he is widely expected to kick off his reelection campaign in the coming months.

The national Democratic Party is already closing ranks behind Biden. Ahead of Williamson’s campaign launch, the Democratic National Committee signaled to ABC News that it does not plan to sponsor any primary debates ahead of the 2024 election.

For some perspective on the difficult odds that Williamson would face if Biden runs again, it’s worth remembering that the last time a Democrat launched a serious primary challenge against a sitting Democratic president was when Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) ran against then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Neither Kennedy’s status as a surviving scion of a political family akin to royalty, nor his prominence as a torch-bearer for late 20th-century liberalism were enough to unseat the Democratic incumbent.

But that does not mean that Williamson’s campaign lacks a purpose. She speaks for a left-leaning segment of the electorate perpetually dissatisfied with Democratic leaders’ incremental policy vision and sees everything to gain – and nothing to lose – in keeping the progressive heat on Biden.

Williamson told HuffPost that she is disappointed in Biden’s failure to push back against the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling that the budget reconciliation process could not be used to raise the minimum wage; what she sees as the administration’s complacent response to the expiration of the expanded child tax credit; and the Biden administration’s continued approval of oil and gas drilling permits.

Williamson even dismisses the new law empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for the first time as “slow and incremental change, which still leaves corporations price-gouging the American people.” She wants Biden to take advantage of “march-in rights” that entitle him to require pharmaceutical companies to license the patents for brand-name prescription drugs developed with federal money to other drugmakers.

Williamson also points to a January poll that found that just 37% of Democrats think Biden should run for reelection.

“The issue is not whether I personally am disappointed with the current administration. The issue is whether the agenda of this administration will win the presidency,” Williamson said. “Democratic voters want and deserve an opportunity to decide what agenda they think would be the best one to offer the American people as a choice in 2024.”

. . . [Nathan Robinson, a left-wing author and editor-in-chief of the socialist magazine Current Affairs] is excited about the possibility of a candidate like Williamson who has a following with apolitical “normies” of the kind that progressives might not normally reach.

It’s a potential strength that Williamson acknowledges, even as she seeks to forge a political brand independent of her status as a bestselling [spiritual author].

Williamson’s fans “are voters,” she said. “Politics doesn’t get to delineate between the voters that they think are legitimate versus voters that they don’t think are legitimate.”

Still, I asked her whether Donald Trump’s presidency had taken some of the shine off of installing a political neophyte in the White House.

“The problem with President Trump was not his lack of political experience,” Williamson said. “The problem with President Trump is his character.”

– Daniel Marans
Excerpted from “This Time, Marianne Williamson
Wants to Be Taken Seriously”
The Huffington Post
March 13, 2023

Marianne Williamson interviwed by Neil Cavuto – Fox News, March 17, 2023 (12 mins) . . .

The dismissal of Marianne Williamson is unfair. She has a solid [and genuinely progressive] agenda and is an inspiring orator. We should keep an open mind about her candidacy, especially since Biden needs a serious challenger.

. . . Frankly, I want Williamson to do well. Joe Biden needs a progressive challenger. He’s a terrible president, unpopular with the voters. Democratic Party leaders have rallied around him, and are insisting that he has “exceeded expectations” (expectations were virtually zero, making the statement meaningless). But he needs a serious challenger. This is for several reasons. First, Biden is incompetent and conservative, and we need a president who is not willing to destroy the planet to save the oil companies. Second, Biden’s renomination is not supported by the majority of Democrats. I don’t have any confidence that he’ll be able to successfully defeat a Trump-DeSantis ticket. (My greatest fear is that Trump will beat DeSantis in the primary only to make him the vice presidential nominee after a bit of abject groveling from DeSantis.) I happen to believe that voters deserve to have meaningful choices, rather than just rubber-stamping the incumbent. But with most Democrats making it clear they won’t challenge Biden, it looks like Williamson might be his only opponent. If that’s the case, I want her to be a serious contender, because if she runs only to be completely crushed, it will bolster Biden’s case that he has widespread popular support.

. . . Williamson needs to think with ruthless strategic precision about how to get the attention of voters. It won’t be easy. Much of the media will try to ignore her. But I don’t think we should write her off just yet. The incumbent is unpopular. That creates an opening. Williamson is a skilled speaker with a compelling agenda who can inspire listeners. She has a clear set of weaknesses to address. I hope she addresses them. I hope Williamson IS serious about this campaign, because I want people to take it seriously. We need someone to effectively challenge the Democratic establishment and I hope she shows us that it was a mistake for people to underestimate her.

– Nathan J. Robinson
Excerpted from “Marianne Williamson Deserves
to Be Taken Seriously”
Current Affairs
March 14, 2023

Marianne Williamson interviwed by John Iadarola and Francesca Fiorentini – The Damage Report, March 21, 2023 (18 mins) . . .

[My campaign] is about ending a 50-year aberrational chapter of American history and beginning a new one. Neoliberalism has devastated not only our economy – creating the greatest income inequality in 100 years – it has infected every aspect of our culture with injustice and despair. It’s time for us to recognize that, cut the cord, and begin again. It’s going to take someone who is not of that machine to smash it.

. . . [That] is key to my strength here and I’ll tell you why: I have dealt in my 40-year career with helping people both endure crises, and transform them. That is exactly what this country needs now: someone who can help us both endure and transform the trauma of these times. The chaos is external, but the trauma created by the chaos is internal. Secondly, because of my experience with all kinds of personality types and all kinds of people, I have a deep understanding of what a sociopath is. A sociopath is someone who simply doesn’t care. . . . It is because of that that I recognize as deeply as I do that an economic system – namely hyper-capitalism, namely neoliberalism – has at its root a deep spiritual darkness. It does not care. It is a sociopathic economic system that prioritizes short-term profit maximization for these huge corporate entities. It is a destructive force. And the political establishment, at its best right now, only tries to stave off its worst aspects. That’s what corporatist Democrats do. They recognize the disease to some extent, and they try to help people survive it. But they refuse to challenge the underlying corporate forces that make the return of all that pain and all that trauma inevitable.

– Marianne Williamson
Quoted in John Nichols’ article,
“Marianne Williamson: ‘Anything Is Possible’”
The Nation
March 9, 2023

Marianne Williamson interviwed by Kyra Phillips – ABC News, March 15, 2023 (14 mins) . . .

Not all chains are visible. People are shackled by the economic insecurity and anxiety baked into the cake of a system where a stockholder value and short-term profit maximization for huge corporate entities is put before the safety, health, and well-being of people, animals, and the planet. And . . . our government is bought and sold by those [same corporate entities]. The government in Washington DC has become a system of legalized bribery. The government should be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s become a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. You can’t have a democracy and behave that way. Louis Brandeis, the late Supreme Court Justice, said, “You can either have vast amounts of money in the hands of a few, or you can have democracy. You can’t have both.” We have an oligarchy today, and I’m running for president because if somebody doesn’t name it, then there’s no way we can disrupt that system. And if we don’t disrupt that system, we are going to lose our democracy to the neo-fascist threat that is in our midst.

– Marianne Williamson
Quoted in Nathan J. Robinson’s article,
“Marianne Williamson on Her
Insurgent Campaign Against Joe Biden”
Current Affairs
March 19, 2023

The Wild Reed

Friday, March 24, 2023

More Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s Presidential Run

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