WASHINGTON (AP) — Independent author Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 White House campaign featured more whimsical calls for spiritual healing than actual voter support, launched another longshot bid for the presidency on Saturday, becoming the first Democrat to officially challenge President Joe Biden. nomination 2024.
“I am, now, a candidate for president of the United States,” he said at the campaign kickoff in the nation’s capital.
The 70-year-old spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey will almost certainly provide a token primary opposition — a testament to how strongly national Democrats are united behind Biden. Instead, he tweaked the president, a longtime Amtrak rider, by holding an inaugural rally in the presidential suite at Union Station, Washington’s train hub.
Biden gave his own speech from Union Station, near the Capitol, before last November’s election, when he led Democrats in a stunning performance, urging voters to reject political extremism and saying “democracy itself” was at stake.
Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign sign features the dual slogans “A New Beginning,” and “Disrupt the System,” plans to campaign in early voting states in the 2024 election calendar, including New Hampshire, which he has threatened to contest. a plan backed by Biden by the Democratic National Committee to have South Carolina lead the nomination contest.
Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire have warned that if Biden passes the unapproved state primary and wins, the results could prove embarrassing for the sitting president — even if the challenger fails to become the nominee.
“You can appreciate what the president has done, beat the Republicans in 2020, and still feel like now is the time to move on,” Williamson said in a recent interview with “Good Morning New Hampshire.”
Biden, 80, is the oldest president in US history and will be 86 at the end of his second term. Most people in the United States — and most Democrats — say they don’t want him to run again, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The president is expected to announce next week if he will run again. First lady Jill Biden recently told the AP that there is “pretty much” nothing the president should do but choose the time and place to announce his re-election bid.
Biden’s political advisers say they are not worried about the Democratic primary and say Biden is eager to beat Donald Trump again in the general election. He said the 2024 campaign against other GOP candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, will look similar because top Republicans remain promoters of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
The Democratic establishment — and even potential presidential candidates who could compete against Biden from the left or center — are behind Biden, suggesting that his path to the nomination is smooth. Although other Democrats are following Williamson’s lead and jumping into the race, the party is not planning a primary debate.
Williamson insists the 2024 campaign is about more than just making a statement. In an online post last weekend, he did not mention Trump by name but noted that few predicted he would ride his unconventional campaign to the White House seven years ago.
“Since the 2016 election it has been strange for anyone who thought they could know who might win the presidency,” Williamson wrote. “And I’m not doing this anymore just to add to the conversation. I’m running for president to help finish an aberrational chapter of history, and help make a new beginning.
A Texas native who currently resides in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of more than a dozen books. In the 1980s, he opened the Life Center in Los Angeles, and later New York, which worked to support people affected by HIV and AIDS. He ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014 and supported the progressive challenger of Sen. Vermont Bernie Sanders 2016 from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, Williamson famously wanted to create a Department of Peace and said the federal government should pay huge financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
On the debate stage, he called racism “part of the dark underbelly of American society.” While declaring that Trump has used fear to gain political advantage, he criticized his fellow Democratic candidates for getting lost in the “wonkiness” of policy details rather than trying to curb the president’s “dark psychic power of collective hatred.”
In the midst of a fundraising struggle, Williamson cut his staff nationwide and suspended his campaign in the weeks before the 2020 Iowa caucus leadoff, saying he did not want to “hinder the candidate moving forward.” He then endorsed Sanders in the 2020 presidential contest. He came second to Biden.