New age self-help author Marianne Williamson says she will run for the Democratic 2024 presidential nomination, adding her quirky spiritualism to the mix as the first official challenger to President Joe Biden from within his party.
“We are not living in easy times,” Williamson said in an a statement. “But the times will change when we are willing to change them.”
Williamson, 70, said she she will formally announce her long shot run in a speech in Washington, D.C., this weekend and will visit early voting states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Quoting Albert Einstein, Williamson said the world’s problems won’t be solved unless leaders raise their level of thinking.
“It’s time for a new beginning,” she said. “This will only happen if we’re willing to look at the world in a different way.”
Political pundits give Williamson next to no chance of winning even though she is the first candidate to jump into the race.
Biden hasn’t formally announced he will run for reelection but insiders say he plans to do so in the next several weeks.
First Lady Jill Biden recently suggested there is “pretty much” no doubt Biden will run for four more years in the White House.
Williamson, who occasionally livened up staid debates with wacky pronouncements, spent about a year vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination as part of a sprawling field that eventually came down to a battle between Biden and progressive favorite Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
One of Williamson’s signature proposals was a plan to create a U.S. Department of Peace. She also advocated that the federal government pay reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.
Williamson once credited “the power of the mind” with keeping a dangerous hurricane offshore.
She pulled the plug on her campaign in the weeks before the first Democratic voters made their voices heard in the leadoff Iowa caucus and later endorsed Sanders.
