In a case of twisted déja vu, Joe Biden and his people are operating on a kind of doom flavor of Hillary’s 2016 inevitability syndrome – he’s all we have so he better win seems to be the feeling around him—and he better make it to the election because if he doesn’t then it’s Kamala or Boot-Edge-Edge and that’s no good. Joe Biden is almost assured to be re-nominated for re-election, but Dean Phillips a latecomer challenger is by many accounts surging. He won't win, but why is a rather conventional centrist billionaire democratic congressman from Minnesota who you never heard of before I told you his name surging? Because people are sick of Joe Biden. Moreover Dean Phillips is surging because he represents the same order as Joe Biden but in a younger package. What is with this country? We are facing environmental catastrophe, massive inequality, a resurgence of fascism, conflict in the hottest hotspots on the planet that threaten to involve us in a new perhaps apocalyptic World War, but we seem only capable of baby steps. Friends, we don't have the luxury of baby steps. We need to stop pretending we're going to learn. We need to learn. Yesterday.
Speaking to a crowd in Portsmouth New Hampshire this weekend, Marianne Williamson said: "What this country needs is a visionary. I may not be the best visionary, but I can tell you I am the only one running for President of the United States."
1. Vote your wishes. It's too early to hold your nose. That comes in November. I prefer Biden to Trump by a margin, but not enough to fritter my free primary vote on him for any reason. Primaries are for dreaming of getting what you want.
2. The Vision Thing - She is the only candidate promoting FDR's unfinished business: an Economic bill of rights. She is for Medicare For All; Free college and trade school for all; cancellation of student debt; paid family leave; and a guaranteed living wage. She says, rightly that with Trump we're heading straight for the iceberg. With Biden, we are heading for a glancing piercing blow to the hull. Only Marianne Williamson is saying what we need to hear-- we need to turn this fucking thing around!
3. Environment - The environment is being murdered by a repeat offender called Capitalism. There really is only one candidate who you can vote for now! who recognizes the environmental harm that capitalism is and who has a plan to address it. She is the only candidate giving the environment the urgency that it demands.
4. Troublemaking - Why should Joe Biden (whose campaign is cancelling primaries left and right to try to make you forget how unpopular he is) have it easy? None of the other democrats running-- being essentially new and improved versions of Joe Biden's complicity in the mess that we are all living with-- give him trouble quite like Marianne Williamson. She promises to be nothing like Joe Biden. Thank goodness!
5. Peace - Marianne Williamson unlike the incumbent (whichever incumbent you think is President) is for a complete ceasefire in Gaza. She also advocates for a Department of Peace whose business will be the promotion and sustaining of global Peace. In essence, Marianne Williamson is for giving Peace some teeth.
6. Pro-Labor - Before declaring her candidacy, Marianne Williamson was an early critic of Joe Biden's antagonistic response to the striking railroad workers, calling him, because of his strike breaking moves, an "economic royalist." Over the summer, in an effort to jumpstart the national conversation on topics of importance, Marianne Williamson featured conversations with a number of activists to discuss causes from LGBTQ+ to the plight of Palestinians in Israel. But no topic was covered more frequently than the various causes of labor, particularly among teachers, screen writers and actors, auto workers, and the burgeoning movements such as Starbuck employees and Amazon workers. You will not hear a Marianne Williamson speech that is not centered around giving working people the better life they deserve; the life that she recognizes has been stolen from them by corporate greed.
7. Pro-People - Whatever your identity, Marianne Williamson is for you. Are you for Marianne?
8. Anger - Marianne was the first candidate to challenge Joe Biden; she announced before the vernal equinox last year. So why do you never see her on any of the major cable news networks (with the exception of Fox which you don't watch.)? Seriously, why? Why is the mainstream media pretending creaky, leaky Joe Biden has no challengers? If you aren't pissed about that, what's wrong with you? If you are pissed, take it out of their hides with a spite vote for Marianne Williamson and you just might accidentally get the kind of society where the media isn't a propaganda arm for the man.
9. Anti Cop City - I don't think even Bernie Sanders would have featured Anti Cop City activists on his campaign agenda. Last summer, on her campaign podcast, Marianne Williamson highlighted the cause of defeating the dystopian Cop City-- a project that threatens to build a state-of-the-art high tech militaristic training ground on the site of an Atlanta forest in order to give cops from the US, Israel and other police states a place to rehearse the clampdown in spite of overwhelming unpopularity among the Atlantans whose forest is being destroyed for the project.
10. Love - Marianne Williamson is a proponent of what she calls a politics of love. I'm cynical and hard-hearted enough that I still haven't gotten around to investigating what she means by a politics of love; but I'm pretty sure I prefer it to the prevailing politics of hate. I don't think the abundance of reasons to be cynical and hard-hearted in this cold, dead age give them any special claim over love as a force to be desired and cultivated in our politics. I'm not motivated by love. But I hope you are. And if you are, Marianne Williamson is your candidate. This is your chance.
11. Self-Indulgence - You're in the voting booth. There are a handful of names. A bunch of men and one woman. No one's watching. Do it because it feels good.
12. Excitement - Marianne Williamson has said repeatedly (and accurately) that the greatest threat to democrats is not Donald Trump-- the greatest threat is people staying home on election day. With his standard neoliberal democrat fixation on centrist suburban republicans, non-voters are once again not going to be in Joe Biden's calculation. Marianne Williamson is for promoting an agenda that even chronic non-voters can get excited about. This is how the American voters win.
13. Self-Imposed Term Limit - Marianne Williamson has said that she's not interested in more than one term. She is self-imposing a limit of a single term on herself because she wants to be motivated not by re-election but by the urgency that inspired her to run in the first place.
16. Perversion - Come on! You know you want to. Let's just all do it and see what happens!
17. Last (in this list because it is so late), vote for Marianne Williamson because you still can.
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* Vote for whomever you want in the General election. This is about disrupting the most disruptible of the two parties of the duopoly. If you haven't considered your ability to disrupt the most disruptible of the 2 parties of the duopoly, I suggest you give it some thought before you lose your opportunity when the democratic primary is over. If the deadline makes you nervous, good.
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