Marianne Williamson, the best-selling author who launched her 2024 presidential campaign one month ago today, has been rapidly gaining steam, rising from near anonymity to ten percent support the new Echelon Insights poll.
It should be helpful that Williamson has an amazing progressive agenda, but the true key to understanding the 2024 presidential is recognizing that Biden is a train wreck.
After Biden awarded a major victory over labor to the nation’s railroad owners, Norfolk Southern returned the favor with a train derailment that released a flood of hazardous chemicals into the environment and endangered the health of Ohio residents and wildlife. There is a saying in politics, that no good deed goes unpunished but Biden screwed working class union members who supported his election to send more profits for the nation’s railroad owners, who are part of the oligarchy that favored Donald Trump.
Proving once again that no good deed gets done by Biden, a man who can screw up a one car funeral.
Biden’s popularity among African-American voters rests largely on his association with President Barack Obama, who selected the Delaware senator as vice president partially to accent differences.
As one write put it, “Obama’s campaign stressed nontraditional blocs: the youth, individuals who normally didn’t caucus, and non-Democrats. The strategy was fueled partly by organization and partly by Obama’s message, which was ready-made for his youth-and-independent appeal.” Biden, a senator for 36 years, was old and white and traditional. Obama’s appeal was everything that Joe Biden is not.
In contrast, Williamson can actually tailor a message that appeals to ordinary rank-and-file Democrats like senior citizens, the people most likely to vote in a primary election or attend a caucus, because she has has a pragmatic and painless solution to the looming crisis in Social Security that Biden has ignored since he voted in 1983 to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67. Williamson would be the first woman elected as president, a barrier-breaking accomplishment that is more akin to Obama than anything that Biden’s spin doctors can dream up.
Social Security’s predicament is not Biden’s only weakness.
Although he defeated Republican Donald Trump in 2020, Biden is by no means assured of being able to pull that off again. His team has not only utterly failed to bring the plotters behind the failed coup d’etat to justice, his administration is also viewed as partisan to the limited extent that it tried to enforce the law against the January 6 terrorists.
The Silicon Valley Bank failure resulted in a near-immediate Wall Street bailout, which is not a thing that is popular among Democratic activists.
In just two years, Biden approved four times as many oil and gas leases on federal land as the Trump administration did in four years, breaking an explicit campaign promise that was loud
New York and Philadelphia agreed in separate cases to pay a total of $16.24 million to 664 citizens who were arrested and beaten by police while protesting police brutality over the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The rise in gun homicides in the United States is having reverberating political ramifications at the federal, state, and local levels, with many elected officials falling back into “tough on crime” policies to curb the violence.
This punitive turn can be seen in President Joe Biden’s proposed federal budget calls for “more police officers on the beat” and allocates $30 billion to revert to the old “tough on crime” playbook and rolling back criminal justice reforms, mirroring an approach that has repeatedly failed instead of centering on crime prevention strategies and efforts to curb gun violence.
“Williamson is the only candidate for president that has so far said things that make sense,” said Lisa McCormick, a prominent progressive activist and former congressional candidate. “She understands that politics is about more than just policies and promises – it’s about values and vision.”
Other notable supporters of Williamson’s second bid for the White House include actress Susan Sarandon, who has praised her as a “bold voice” for the progressive movement, and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who has endorsed her Medicare for All plan and called her a “thoughtful and passionate leader.”
Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman won over Americans by declaring he was fighting for everyone “that ever got knocked down,” and defeated discredited misinformation-spouting television celebrity Mehmet Oz, widely known as Dr. Oz, who has long pushed misleading, science-free and unproven alternative therapies such as homeopathy, as well as fad diets, detoxes and cleanses.