Progressive activist Lisa McCormick said establishment Democrats would be making a big mistake if they brush off Marianne Williamson’s 2024 primary challenge to President Joe Biden.
McCormick was in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 2023, when Williamson kicked off her campaign, with a speech that called for fundamental change in America, with ordinary people taking back power from the rich and their corporate machines.
“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.”
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.”
to end an aberrational chapter of American history, where wealth and opportunity has been siphoned off to a few at the expense of the many.”
McCormick is known for earning a stunning 159,998 votes in her 2018 Democratic primary challenge to US Senator Robert Menendez. To put that in perspective, the 2020 presidential campaign US Senator Bernie Sanders scored 140,000 New Jersey ballots and the total Democratic primary turnout in 2015 was 158,993.
Williamson is the only Democrat challenging President Biden, who is viewed as a possibly weak contender after hitting a number of low points in the White House, but most of the political establishment has fallen in line behind the president following midterm election showing that was stronger than expected.
“Joe Biden lost the House of Representatives and he frequently failed to get his own party on board to pass his agenda,” said McCormick. “Despite some legislative successes, he has been disappointing as a leader and ineffectual on the major issues of the day.”
McCormick noted that Rep. Barbara Lee said Biden’s 2024 budget request, “continues the regressive trend of increasing our bloated, wasteful defense budget year after year with little oversight.” “
“I am also dismayed by the insufficient funding levels for critical priorities such as racial equity, funding community violence intervention and prevention, protecting voting rights, and fighting back against the attacks on reproductive justice,” said Lee, who was the sole member of Congress to vote against granting the president unlimited authorization for military mayhem after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
About 74 people resided in McPherson Square, the largest homeless encampment in the nation’s capital, until February 15, 2023, when the Biden administration forcibly removed them from the largest homeless encampment in the nation’s capital – an action strongly condemned by the National Coalition for Housing Justice (NCHJ) as cruel and counterproductive to efforts to end homelessness.
“The victims of poverty, addiction, and mental health struggles have been scattered but the Biden administration failed to address the problems that made them homeless,” said McCormick. “In Chicago; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and in the nation’s capital, a few blocks from the White House, thousands of homeless Americans need a new president.”
Williamson’s run for president is being greeted with an eye roll among political strategists and met with silence within the Democratic establishment but most people in the United States — and even most Democrats — say they don’t want Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, to run again, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
After her first week campaigning in New Hampshire, Williamson picked up endorsements from State Representative Maria Perez, the vice chair of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators, and Carlos Cardona, a newly elected member of the New Hampshire Democratic Party Rules Committee.