Self-help writer Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 White House campaign featured more quirky calls for spiritual healing than actual voter support, launched one other longshot bid for the presidency on Saturday, becoming the primary Democrat to formally challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.
“I, as of today, am a candidate for the office of president of america,” she said in a campaign kickoff within the nation’s capital.
The 70-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey will almost actually provide only token primary opposition — a testament to how strongly national Democrats are united behind Biden. Still, she tweaked the president, a longtime Amtrak rider, by holding her opening rally on the presidential suite at Union Station, Washington’s railway hub.
Biden gave his own speech from Union Station, near the Capitol, just before last November’s elections, when he led Democrats to a surprisingly strong showing, urging voters to reject political extremism and saying “democracy itself” was at stake.
Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign signs feature the twin slogans “A Latest Starting,” and “Disrupt the System,” plans to campaign in early-voting states on the 2024 election calendar, including Latest 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 Latest Hampshire have warned that if Biden skips the state’s unsanctioned primary and a rival wins it, that end result could prove embarrassing for the sitting president — even when that challenger has no real shot of truly being the nominee.
“You possibly can appreciate what the president has done, defeating the Republicans in 2020, and still feel that it’s time to move on,” Williamson said in a recent interview with “Good Morning Latest Hampshire.”
Biden, 80, is the oldest president in U.S. history and can be 86 at the top of a second term. Most individuals in america — and even most Democrats — say they don’t desire him to run again, in keeping with a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The president is anticipated to announce in the approaching weeks that he’s running again. First lady Jill Biden recently told the AP that there was “just about” nothing left for the president to do but pick a time and place to announce his reelection bid.
Biden’s political advisers say they don’t seem to be anxious in regards to the Democratic primary and say Biden is anxious to defeat Donald Trump again in the final election. They are saying a 2024 campaign against one other GOP nominee, similar to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, would look much the identical because top Republicans remain promoters of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
The Democratic establishment — and even potential presidential hopefuls who could have competed against Biden from the left or middle — is behind Biden, showing how smooth his path to the nomination probably will probably be. Even when other Democrats follow Williamson’s lead and jump into the race, the party is just not planning to carry primary debates.
Williamson insists her 2024 campaign is about excess of just making a press release. In an online post last weekend, she didn’t mention Trump by name but noted that few predicted he would ride an unconventional campaign all of the technique to the White House seven years ago.
“For the reason that election of 2016 it’s odd for anyone to think they’ll know who can win the presidency,” Williamson wrote. “And I’m not putting myself through this again just so as to add to the conversation. I’m running for president to assist bring an aberrational chapter of our history to an in depth, and to assist bring forth a recent starting.”
A Texas native who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the writer of greater than a dozen books. Within the Nineteen Eighties, she opened the Center for Living in Los Angeles, and later Latest York, which worked to support individuals with HIV and AIDS. She ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014 and supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 progressive challenge of eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, Williamson was best known for wanting to create a Department of Peace and arguing the federal government should pay massive financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination.
On the controversy stage, she called racism “a part of the dark underbelly of American society.” While declaring that Trump had used fear for political gain, she chided her fellow Democratic candidates for getting too lost within the “wonkiness” of policy details moderately than attempting to stop the then-president’s “dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred.”
Amid fundraising struggles, Williamson laid off her staff nationwide and suspended her campaign within the weeks before 2020′s leadoff Iowa caucus, saying she didn’t wish to “get in the best way of a progressive candidate winning.” She later endorsed Sanders within the 2020 presidential contest. He finished second to Biden.
