Self-help guru and author Marianne Williamson announced Thursday she will seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. She is the first Democrat to announce a challenge to President Joe Biden, who has indicated he is likely to run but has not formally declared his candidacy
Williamson entered the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process in 2019, but her candidacy never connected. She ended her campaign in January 2020.
She announced her return in an interview with Northwestern University’s Medill on the Hill. She plans to make an official announcement on March 4.
“I wouldn’t be running for president if I didn’t believe I could contribute to harnessing the collective sensibility that I feel is our greatest hope at this time,” she said.
“People who run the government are divided into two categories, those who either don’t care to fix it, or do not have the spine to fix it. And neither category should be running this country,” she said.
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Williamson castigated the Democratic Party for re-ordering the slate of primaries to make South Carolina – where Biden runs well – its first primary.
“How can you claim to be a champion of democracy when your own process is so undemocratic?” she said.
Williamson said the media helped torpedo her previous campaign.
“They tried to paint me as silly, they tried to paint me as unserious because they know I’m not,” she said.
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Williamson said she pins her hopes on young Americans.
“What we’re experiencing is the latest iteration of forces who put their property rights and their short term economic gain before the health, safety and well-being of the majority of people. Other generations have pushed back against that. Now it’s our turn to do that,” she said/
During debates in the summer of 2019, Williamson’s comments drew attention for being off of the beaten path of political phraseology.
During one debate, she said she was “going to harness love for political purposes,” according to USA Today.
In a second debate, when discussing the problems of undrinkable water plaguing Flint, Michigan, she called the city’s long-running problem “the tip of the iceberg.”
“If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days,” she said, referring to former President Donald Trump.
Williamson had attacked the role of money in politics.
“For politicians including my fellow candidates who themselves have taken tens of thousands and in some cases of hundreds of thousands of dollars from these same corporate donors to think that they now have the moral authority to now say we’re going to take them on I don’t think the Democratic party should be surprised that so many Americans believe ‘yada, yada, yada,’” she said.
In an October 2019 Op-Ed in The Washington Post, she savaged the Democratic Party.
“Party bosses think they know better, claiming the right through money and establishment power to wage what amounts to an insidious assault on one of the most important aspects of our democratic process: selecting the presidential nominee,” she wrote.
“The old days of political backroom deals, where a few insiders determined who the candidate would be, are back. They didn’t really go away at all; they’re simply repackaged now, standing right in front of us, rebranding themselves as an ‘open process.’ Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: faux democracy,” she wrote.
She later equated proposals coming from her rivals as “the stale alternative of political leftovers, prepackaged as bromides with all the vitality and richness of spoiled food.”
