Self-help guru and Democrat presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson was back on friendly turf on Thursday when she spoke to a crowd in the Mission District of San Franciso. Williamson talked a lot about children, including claiming that it’s not fossil fuels or “clean” energy that will fuel America’s future but the minds of young ones growing up today.
The news outlet Mission Local entitled its report on the speech, “Hot for Marianne Williamson: Unique Democratic presidential hopeful addresses sweltering Mission crowd,” and reported that it was more than 90 degrees in Manny’s “political” cafe, but the candidate’s campaign hasn’t really heated up:
Truth be told, Williamson — a 67-year-old self-help guru and decidedly the Democrats’ “new age” candidate — is not so hot, polling-wise at least. Running at 2 percent in the friendliest of polls, she has a snowball’s chance in overheated San Francisco of winning the Democratic nomination. And this is for a fairly good reason: Williamson made a name for herself writing seven New York Times best-sellers on self-help, has referred to herself as Oprah’s spiritual adviser, officiated Elizabeth Taylor’s seventh marriage (at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch), and has, on occasion, advocated not vaccinating children.
Her only political experience has come in the form of a failed 2014 33rd District Congressional (Los Angeles-area) bid — she missed the podium with a fourth-place finish and 13 percent of the vote — and a book titled Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as American Citizens. It did not make the best-seller list.
The news outlet reported that Williamson’s main message was that morality, not public policy, should be the driving force in making decisions and policies.
“Some people would say I’m naive,” Williamson said. “The idea that I believe love, rather than market forces disconnected from all moral considerations, should be the operating principle of human civilization.”
And Williamson, who has said as president she would create a Department of Children and Youth, talked a lot about kids, Mission Local reported, including her belief that it is the minds of children who will “fuel America’s abundance.”
“We have millions of children going to school every day asking the teacher if maybe the teacher has something for them to eat,” she said. “If we want the power that will fuel American abundance … it’s not power in the ground like oil; it’s not in the sun either; it’s not in the wind either.”
It’s the minds of children that will decide the future so we should take better care of them, Williamson said, according to the Mission Local.
“And then there were the Williamson moments everyone came to see,” Mission Local reported. “During a discussion on the nation’s massive defense budget, Williamson compared national security to the human body.”
“You can’t just take medicine — you have to cultivate your health,” Williamson said. “And with war and peace, the same is true.”
“Sickness is the absence of health; health isn’t the absence of sickness,” she said. “And war is the absence of peace; peace isn’t the absence of war.”
Williamson also pledged not to drop out of the race, even though the candidate has neither earned a 2 percent ranking in four DNC-approved polls nor gained the 130,000 unique donors required to qualify for the next Democrat debate in Houston in September.
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