Her Again?

Marianne Williamson is running for President again. 

Because if a crooked real-estate developer (I know, a redundancy) and beauty-pageant owner could be President (he couldn't), why not a college dropout turned self-help love guru and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey? 

"I wouldn’t be running for President," Williamson said, "if I didn’t believe I could contribute to harnessing the collective sensibility that I feel is our greatest hope at this time."

You mean the collective sensibility that calls upon us to stand by President Biden and quell a primary challenge from within the Democratic Party that could help the 2024 Republican presidential nominee?

To those who are content to write off Marianne Williamson as a sideshow who isn't going anywhere - a description Edward-Isaac Dovere gleefully used to describe Martin O'Malley - Republicans were quick to so the same to Pat Buchanan in 1992, but his presidential candidacy derailed George Bush's re-election hopes.  Williamson could very well be able harness - as she puts it - pie-in-the-sky progressives who are dissatisfied with Biden's efforts to return America to the social contract that existed before Ronald Reagan destroyed it and fail to realize that the collapse of much of his progressive agenda was due to various reasons (*cough cough*, Joe Manchin, *cough cough*, Kyrsten Sinema, *cough cough*), and she could end up forming an unexpectedly potent political force.

And those who still doubt that possibility, I offer these two words - Bernie Sanders.    

And now that Marianne's in, I expect Dwayne Johnson - who has seriously talked about running for President with CNN's Jake Tapper -to throw his hat into the ring as well.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Can anyone tell me what sort of nation we're living in where Marianne Williamson and Dwayne Johnson are taken seriously as political contenders and Martin O'Malley is laughed at?  This country needs an enema!  

Marianne Faithfully

For those of of you who are disappointed that Oprah Winfrey isn't running for President in 2020, take heart: The Democratic presidential nomination process has a new Winfreyesque candidate to fill the void.

Marianne Williamson declared her candidacy for President not too long ago.  You might remember her as the self-help guru who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from California in 2014.  Well, she's back and she's not just seeking a higher office; she wants to put America in touch with a higher reality.

An explanation: Marianne Williamson's entire shtick is based on a New Age theory of "spiritual regeneration" and the idea that physical reality is just an illusory dream.  This got her Winfrey's attention back in the early nineties, and she quickly became a "spiritual adviser" to Winfrey, who is a big advocate herself of creating one's own reality through magical thinking.  Williamson summed up her entire message of her presidential campaign with this statement on CNN:

"We need a moral and spiritual awakening in the country.  Nothing short of that is adequate to fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction." 

Just gotta have a little faith, right?

But wait - there's more!  Not only do we need an awakening, she says, we need to rediscover love.  This was of course the theme of her 2014 House campaign, and the idea of bringing love to Washington sounds as mushheaded now as it did then.  I may have once said that if we all have love, everything else will fall into place, but getting things done in Washington isn't based on love; it's based on compromise.

And what are her qualifications for the highest office in the land?  A 35-year year career of dealing with "the deeper levels of moral dysfunction" and "naming and transforming those dynamics."

Silly me, and I thought a good qualification for the Presidency was to serve two terms as governor of Maryland.

Anyway, Williamson's platform is mostly no different from other Democratic presidential candidates who have actual experience in governing.  She supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal proposal, universal background checks for gun owners, and tuition-free college.

But get this.  She also advocates a $100 billion budget for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves, to be paid out over ten years.

Not only does this have no chance of becoming reality (but then, Marianne Williamson is famous for being undeterred by reality!), she's going to have to deal with the argument, put forward by cultural critics such as James Howard Kunstler and Jamie Malanowski, that reparations have been paid for slavery  - 360,222 Union soldiers and their Commander-In-Chief, Abraham Lincoln, paid with their lives.     

Even if you favor reparations for the descendants of slaves, you have to admit that Marianne Williamson is completely unqualified to be President and that her candidacy is a joke. It's being taken seriously, though, if only because too many people took a joke candidacy like Donald Trump's seriously, and now we have a bad joke in the White House as a result.  But Trump's election only made it possible for anyone to run for President.  Even a flaky New Age guru like Williamson.   

So if I think we should not take her seriously, why am I writing about her?  Because it beats talking about Tulsi Gabbard.

I think Martin O'Malley made a huge mistake by deciding not to run for President in 2020.  He scoffed at the idea of inexperienced celebrities like Oprah running for the job, yet Williamson is a candidate and O'Malley isn't.  So far the choices for an opponent for Trump have ranged from unsatisfying to dismaying.  I don't see that changing any time soon.