WASHINGTON — Self-help author Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 White House campaign featured more quirky calls for spiritual healing than actual voter support, launched another longshot bid for the presidency on Saturday, becoming the first Democrat to formally challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.
"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."
The 70-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey should 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 at the ornately marble-columned presidential suite at Union Station, Washington's railway hub.
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Biden gave his own speech from Union Station 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. He is expected to announce in the coming weeks that he's running again.
Williamson, whose red, blue and black campaign signs feature the dual slogans "A New Beginning" and "Disrupt the System," says she'll be campaigning in early-voting states on the 2024 election calendar.
That includes New Hampshire, which 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 New Hampshire warned that if Biden skips the state's unsanctioned primary and a rival wins it, that outcome could prove embarrassing for the sitting president — even if that challenger has no real shot of actually being the nominee.
Even if other Democrats follow Williamson into the race, the party is not planning to hold primary debates.
Striking a defiant tone Saturday, 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."
She didn't mention Biden by name in her speech, and though she noted that former President Donald Trump not being reelected in 2020 kept the country from going "over the cliff," she also said it was still "six inches" from doing so.
Williamson said she opposes a free market "mindset" and corrupt political system that she said prioritizes greed above all else "like an atomizer spray of economic injustice."
"The American people have been trained to expect so little," she said. "The American people have been played."
A Texas native who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, Williamson is the author of more than a dozen books and ran an unsuccessful independent congressional campaign in California in 2014. In 2020, she was best known for wanting to create a Department of Peace and arguing the federal government should pay large financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
