Best selling author Marianne Williamson launched her campaign for president by asserting that Americans are drowning in information and starving for understanding.
Speaking at her campaign kickoff in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, Williamson drew the ire of the Democratic Party establishment who would like to dismiss her candidacy and prevent someone from challenging President Biden, who will be nearly 82 at the next presidential election and has struggled to convince many Americans that he is making progress.
Her call to arms declared that the time has come to disrupt the system.
She called for universal health care, free public education and a 21st century bill if economic rights.
“The American people have been played,” said Williamson.
“The media needs to stop legitimizing Marianne Williamson’s campaign for President,” said a now-deleted tweet posted by Aaron Parnas, the son of Lev Parnas, the close confidante of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who was convicted for his role in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. “President Biden has been one of the most revolutionary Presidents in recent history and has the full support of Democrats across America. There is no legitimate primary. Biden is our nominee.”
“Let’s be clear: Marianne Williamson is a joke,” wrote Mexican immigrant and self-described nerd Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow. “She’s a fundamentally unserious candidate running as a stunt to sell her books.”
Several actual Democrats begged to differ.
“Trump Republicans hope to kill the patient to cure the disease while Biden’s political establishment seeks to put a Band-Aid on a brain tumor, said New Jersey progressive leader Lisa McCormick. “It would be disrespectful to the public for news media to dismiss Marianne Williamson’s candidacy since she is the only presidential contender who is talking common sense.”
McCormick noted that Voters of Tomorrow lists among its goals several items that Biden has balked on while they are top features in Williamson’s platform.
Williamson denounced “those who feel they are the adults in the room” and aren’t taking her candidacy seriously, proclaiming, “Let me in there.”
“I have run for president before. I am not naïve about these forces which have no intention of allowing anyone into this conversation who does not align with their predetermined agenda,” she said. “I understand that, in their mind, only people who previously have been entrenched in the car that brought us into this ditch can possibly be considered qualified to bring us out of it.”
Sporting a pink suit in an ornate ballroom inside Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, Williamson referenced the Civil Rights movement, the Civil War, and the founding of the republic – even while railing against powerful economic forces she said overlooked poverty.
She did inveigh against an establishment she described as determined to keep her out of the national debate, in a race where many prominent figures are clearing the field for Biden despite his relatively low popularity and advanced age.
“We are upset about this country, we’re worried about this country,” Williamson told a crowd of more than 600 at a kickoff in the nation’s capital. “It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear.”
The 70-year-old insurgent challenger could reveal the weak facade that has been called united national Democratic support behind Biden, whose approval ratings are still stuck in the low 40s, voters rate his handling of the economy even worse and
While Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from within his own party, which according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, 64 percent of Democratic voters would prefer a new presidential nominee in the 2024 campaign.
Biden gave his own speech from Union Station just before last November’s elections, when he led Democrats to a surprisingly strong showing, .
Still, she tweaked the president, a longtime Amtrak rider, by holding her opening rally at the ornately marble-columned presidential suite at Union Station, Washington’s railway hub.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and set off a cascade of abortion bans around the country, a growing number of women are demanding accountability for the greatest civil rights policy failure in generations.
Williamson claimed her motivations are “a moral commitment to the tenets of liberty espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, a realization of the Democratic Party’s shift away from the party of President Franklin Roosevelt, and the systemic economic injustices endured by millions of Americans by the undue influence of corporate money on our political system.”
Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign signs feature the dual slogans “A New Beginning” and “Disrupt the System,” says she’ll be campaigning in early-voting states on the 2024 election calendar.
That includes New Hampshire, which has threatened to defy a Biden-backed plan by the Democratic National Committee to have South Carolina lead off the nominating contests. Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire have warned that if Biden skips the state’s unsanctioned primary and a rival wins it, that outcome could prove embarrassing for the sitting president — even if that challenger has no real shot of actually being the nominee.
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