By the time I read Bernie Sanders' It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism last winter, it was clear that he was not going to be making another run for the presidency. The reason was obvious-- he was not going to challenge Joe Biden who by a year ago had finally decided (to near universal dismay) to run for re-election. Joe Biden's fault again. But as I read Bernie's book, it was not hard to see it as a testament for the campaign that never was. I read it with some sadness at what could have been.
About the same time, I happened to catch the historian Prof Harvey J Kaye of Wisconsin on some program singing praises for the campaign of Marianne Williamson whom he was advising in an informal capacity. Apparently Williamson, the spiritual author, 2020 also-ran and ultimately Bernie Sanders surrogate, was also something of a student of American history who had a belief that a course correction for the ills plaguing America and the world could start from the unrealized ideals of the American Revolution, particularly as expressed by the radical, Thomas Paine-- a subject of study for Kaye. As the professor was also an authority on FDR who had urged the revival of the longest serving president's unfulfilled ambition to establish an Economic Bill of Rights for Americans, Williamson had engaged Kaye to advise on how she could make FDR's dream a cornerstone of her 2024 campaign. Kaye's unabashed enthusiasm for Williamson as the only progressive challenging Joe Biden from within his party piqued my interest, and ultimately won me over. There was not exactly a clamor among other progressives to join the Democratic race. I felt sure that an irresistible momentum behind Williamson's campaign was only a matter of time in coming.
Alas, it never came. From her initial 10% share in the early polling of likely Democratic voters, she never rose above 15%. Trounced by Biden and outdone by the only other challenger, the billionaire moderate Dean Phillips in the first three contests, Williamson suspended her campaign. Several factors worked against her. First, a near total media shutout limited voter access to Williamson to her social media accounts and those were not exactly catching fire (aside from some reported excitement on TikTok of all places among a constituency she alone seemed to be courting: Gen Z). The press she did get -- even on left media sites-- when it came at all was negative, often about drama within her organization. Some of her progressive thunder was stolen by the party hopping picaresque entry into the race of Cornel West. As other progressives joined the din of longshot candidates outside the 2 parties of the duopoly, there came to be an unspoken but somewhat rumbled and growing consensus among the many fragmented factions of the left that presidential politics in 2024 was not where it was at. If there was any spark for Marianne Williamson left, it could be found only in the uninhabited corners of the web, such as this.
Some chaotic thoughts, then about the obstacles that Marianne Williamson's 2024 campaign could not seem to overcome at the conclusion of her campaign:
Management Problems - A running theme of the explications of left media for the poverty of their coverage of Marianne Williamson's campaign were rumors of mis- and/or micromanagement, insane tantrums, Non-Disclosure Agreements. The candidate was reportedly closed to traditional concerns of the campaign-hardened series of managers she ate through -- concerns like ballot access, endorsements, coalitions. She was on record saying NDA's seemed to her a standard common sense step for an organization to take. These only seemed to make the scorched earth that disgruntled staffers left in their wake anonymous. At times, being asked to defend her temper even in friendly forums seemed enough to throw her off balance and bring out the surliness. She became increasingly unable to conceal her bitterness about both her lack of mainstream media access and the inability of even left media to resist the behind the scenes drama or to focus on the message of her campaign. Was there plausibility to the charges that the Bernie revolution was being carried on by a flaky high-strung out-of-control diva? Okay. Did it matter? I'm not so sure. No one died working for the campaign. After a rough shakedown, the organization seemed to settle by late summer. Were its priorities of the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina to the exclusion of every of other state malpractice? It wasn't really that kind of campaign. Plenty of campaigns that behave exactly as the pundits and experts tell us they should go down in flames before the first primary vote is cast. Marianne Williamson is not doing it like everybody else has ever done it? So what? What kind of outsider does?
Money - There is no good way to fund elections. Letting billionaires do it gives us the shit hole we live in. But the alternative-- me and you doing it-- hurts like a motherfucker speaking for myself. You and I should not be funding elections, so if you have already come to that conclusion, you're not wrong. Nevertheless those of us who do shell out until we bleed for lack of any better ideas are not being taken. We are buying a tiny morsel of peace of mind. MW was not a grifter. Her funders were not dupes-- if they thought they were getting something in return, I don't think it's MW's fault that they didn't. But it sure is convenient to fault her.
Primary - There is a time for complaining about your choices and a time for making a choice. They can take turns every minute, but it seems to me in this case that the poorness of the choice was exaggerated whereas the reasons for choosing the only truly progressive candidate were aggressively downplayed.
Given that Joe Biden was never going to lose the primary, I fail to understand how it mattered that an alternative came to be before you as long as you had an alternative. The choice that Marianne Williamson represented was not Perfect Guru in chief-- it was for an agenda sorely missing from the conversation. I can't blame voters. But I do blame the media shutout nearly across the spectrum. I do blame the flakiness of the left in 2024.
What now? - Marianne Williamson is on 31 ballots, 3 of which have already happened. As of today there are 27 of those states remaining (along with whatever others are left after the Dems are done pre-emptively cancelling them). As the primaries approached, the decidedly dead momentum for Marianne Williamson or any other human challenger to Joe Biden* inspired some creative write-ins. In New Hampshire there was a movement to write-in Ceasefire. In Michigan there is hope that the write-in candidate Uncommitted will give Joe Biden a run for his money. If it's true that a stick would be preferable to Biden in his toxic, passively pro-genocide, doddering state, then why not a concept like Ceasefire or Uncommitted?
I think it's fine if this is what people do. Ceasefire got half the votes of Marianne Williamson in New Hampshire though. It was not listed in the final official results. As a social media candidate, it turned out to have no advantage that Marianne Williamson didn't. I believe on the whole the smaller Joe Biden's percentage the better; and the symbolism of him losing to Anything Else has an aesthetic appeal, but it does not call for commitment to any single opponent. Therefore vote for or write-in who or whatever you choose (including Marianne Williamson in the states she did not get ballot access to) and we'll see what happens.
For myself, an expression of the bankruptcy of the duopoly is not enough to vote for. I am voting for Marianne Williamson's Economic Bill of Rights.
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* And at this stage, the only challengers that matter are on the democratic primary ballot.
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