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A Democrat's Plan to Rebuild the Democratic Party | 12.1.24
00:15:08
Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson joins us to discuss her experience challenging the DNC and media narratives in the 2024 election cycle. She also outlines her vision for a revitalized Democratic party. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
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- [00:03]
Marianne Williamson
Democratic primary challenger Marianne Williamson says it's not just conservatives who have been shunned by the legacy media. She says she was also criticized and de amplified by the press in favor of establishment candidates who ultimately failed. She's now calling on Democrat voters to hold the media and the DNC accountable.
- [00:23]
Georgia Howe
In today's episode, we speak to Marianne about what it's like going up against the DNC media machine and what kind of platform the Democratic Party needs to champion if they want to be competitive again. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor in chief John Bickley. It's December 1st, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. All right. Well, Marianne, thank you so much for coming on.
- [00:48]
Marianne Williamson
Oh, thank you for having me.
- [00:50]
Georgia Howe
Now, I recently listened to an interview with you on Emily Jasinski's podcast, and I was really impressed. And it also struck me just the fact that the DNC had some real talent on the bench when it comes to you and rfk, but they ended up running eventually with Harris, who obviously had a very weak record in her primary race. Do you think that a more open primary from the start could have changed.
- [01:13]
Marianne Williamson
This outcome in this country? The tradition, and it's an important tradition, is that the political parties stand in the back and the electorate, in this case, obviously, the Democratic voters would decide who the nominee should be. And at that point, the party stands forward because they are a private corporation. They have claimed and won in court with that claim, by the way, that they don't owe it to the American people to have a democratic process. And that's a serious problem because that's candidate suppression. And candidate suppression, to me is a form of voter suppression. And yes, I do believe that it would have changed the outcome.
- [01:50]
Georgia Howe
Now, for listeners who aren't aware, there was a lot that went on behind the scenes in terms of just barriers that were put in Your Way and RFK's Way. Can you just describe some of the things that went on that suppressed some candidates?
- [02:05]
Marianne Williamson
Well, first of all, there is a decision obviously made and they were very overt about it. They said that there will be no primary. They said that. They said that they saw the role of the DNC that year being to ensure that Joe Biden would be the candidate. They were very overt about that, unapologetic about it. The first thing that happens is that they de amplify any other candidate in this case mainly through their partners at CNN and MSNBC. I had run in 2020, and for a minor candidate, I thought that I was given a fair amount of exposure, and that included a CNN town hall for the Democratic electorate. If they don't ever see you on msnbc, if they don't ever see you on cnn, if they don't ever see you on the Sunday news programs, which I was on a bit in 2020, they don't even think that you exist. So first of all, there's that. There's this de amplification of anyone that's not their chosen candidate or their chosen group of candidates. That's number one. The second thing is that they promulgate false narratives about anyone that they would have you believe is not a quote, unquote, credible candidate or a quote, unquote qualified candidate. Now, that qualified issue is extremely important because the US Constitution makes it very clear who's qualified. And that's Anyone who is 35 or older, born here, and has lived here for 14 years. I actually think it's extremely important that the founders did not say that that person had to have been a lawyer or a governor, a senator, or any part of a political class. Our founders were not into this business of a political class, which is basically a form of aristocracy. So notice, oddly enough, how the Republicans, in a very ironic way, in my mind, are actually more open to voices that come from outside that small political crowd that has been running things. So they will say, and it's always some form of that person is crazy, that person is kooky. And they will not only outright lie, but they will also take any something, a small thing that could be taken out of context, build it up. And that's the meanness of politics. The goal being to make sure that serious people wouldn't even be interested in listening to that person. So it's a very nefarious way of controlling the process, which obviously blew up in their face in 2024, which to me is a very, very sad thing for this country.
- [04:33]
Georgia Howe
So who are the people at the top that are making these decisions and is there a way for the voters to get rid of those people?
- [04:41]
Marianne Williamson
Well, two things. First of all, I don't know any. To your first question. I don't know any more than you do. I think that I have my guesses, which I'm sure you have yours, but my guesses would just be sort of the obvious players in terms of is there any way that voters could override this? Absolutely. The biggest problem here was that Democratic voters went along with this ridiculous canard. Two canards. Number one, we don't primary a sitting president. Now, excuse me, the Constitution says we run every four years. The President runs every four years. Okay. I'm old enough to remember when Eugene McCarthy, Senator Eugene McCarthy and Senator Bobby Kennedy Sr. Primaried Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was a sitting primary. They had the courage to primary him for one main reason, and that was their protesting the Vietnam War. It's extremely important that they wage those primary campaigns. It actually forced Lyndon Johnson out. So this idea of not primaring an incumbent is ridiculous. The other thing, of course, was this idea promulgated that anybody running against Joe Biden was a spoiler. Well, that's also ridiculous because anybody who's been in seventh grade civics class knows you can't be a spoiler if you're running in a primary. So all of these narratives, particularly in the day of social media, plus you add to that ridiculous concoctions and lies and smears and character assassination, and this is the way campaigns are manipulated and engineered. And it's very undemocratic. And if the voters ourselves are willing to recognize this, it's very interesting psychologically that the Democratic electorate has developed this kind of codependent relationship with the dnc. I hope that that will change. Now, this idea that the DNC somehow knows what to do. The DNC says we're all gonna get behind Joe Biden. And also the very fact that everybody was okay with, they have chosen Kamala Harris. The citizens of the United States are not supposed to surrender our free thinking. If you surrender your free thinking, you're surrendering your power. And Thomas Jefferson said, the only safe repository for power in the United States is in the hands of the people. But how, you know, you don't just give it away to some group of elite that form what I see at this point as a political media donor industrial complex.
- [07:15]
Georgia Howe
So what do you think the way forward is for the Democratic Party if they're going to succeed in future elections?
- [07:22]
Marianne Williamson
Well, whether you're an individual or an organization, you have to look in the mirror when things have fallen apart. You have to ask yourself, what was my part in this? And I had hoped, and I guess I'm still holding onto some hope. But so far, I have not seen the leadership of the Democratic Party come forward with the level of humble acknowledgement. And that word, humble matters here because people can feel it. There's a humility and an acknowledgement that is necessary here that it goes much deeper than the level of justification and blame that you are hearing now. It's rather the same old people trotting out with the same message. You know, once again, going back a few years when the Republicans had a big debacle back in the 90s. The next day, Newt Gingrich resigned. It was a powerful message. I failed. And here in the Republican Party, it's very interesting. A lot of the leaders of the Republican Party come from the private sector. And in the private sector, it's understood if something's not working on Tuesday, you better try to fix it by Thursday. And if you don't fix it by Thursday, it's a very good chance your business will go down by Saturday. The Democratic Party, unfortunately, behaves differently. If it doesn't work by Monday, we'll try it again. The same thing on Wednesday. If it doesn't work, we'll try it again on Friday. And even if the whole thing goes down on Saturday, we will continue to do what we do on Monday. And if they do, that will put us into really permanent minority status. This has got to be a fundamental shift that would come from a serious reckoning with the fact that the Democratic Party over the last few decades has basically swerved from the traditional values that really fuel the power of the Democratic Party, because those values have forged the psychological and emotional connection between the party and the working people of the United States. That connection has been deeply frayed because the Democratic Party is no longer unequivocally and unabashedly supportive of policies, no matter what, that support the working people of the United States. Now, I'm old enough, and many people are old enough to still be riding the coattails of Franklin Roosevelt that, well, we know they're working on it. We have a whole new generation of people who, in their historical memory, really don't remember a time when the Democratic Party did much more for them than the Republicans. They can't afford college. They can't afford healthcare. They're living in economic survival mode in a way that I certainly didn't when I was their age. And in people's despair, they're looking wherever they feel they might find hope.
- [10:15]
Georgia Howe
Now, you mentioned some of the changing values. If you were in charge of, say, designing a package that Democrats could present to voters, what do you think are the key changes that you'd make to make it more appealing to more people?
- [10:29]
Marianne Williamson
First of all, universal healthcare. The last Democratic president who really tried hard was Bill Clinton. As it is, we have 70 to 90 million people who are uninsured or underinsured. Over half of our bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies. One in four Americans live with medical debt. 1.3 million Americans ration their insulin. You have people in this country who are selling their blood plasma in order to pay their rent. So first of all, a recognition. Donald Trump was actually better. That's what's so ironic here, and painfully ironic, is that Donald Trump was actually better than Kamala Harris at just acknowledging how much pain there is out there. Second of all, look at our college costs. You know, during the 1970s, the average American couple could afford a house. Can you imagine? The average American couple at that time could afford a yearly vacation. They could afford for one parent to stay home with the kids if they wanted to, and they could afford to send their kids to college. Today, it is so different. And back when I was growing up, the University of Texas, University of Florida, University of California had tuition free and near tuition free college situations. This must be addressed. But the Democrats were not talking about this, because the Democrats, for quite a few years now, ever since they started getting corporate cash in the 1970s, now try to have it both ways. They want to help people, but only insofar as it won't cross a line into challenging their own donor base. And at a certain point, and we're way past that point, your values mean more than your money. Harris had the money. Hillary had more money than Trump the first time. Once you surrender your values and your values are no longer clear to people, then you've lost your juice. And that's what's happened to the Democratic Party now.
- [12:26]
Georgia Howe
Last question. We've heard a lot, too, at least in the commentary space, about how the fault of this is at the feet of Latino men. Black men didn't show up the way they usually do. White women didn't show up the way they hoped they might. Do you think the blaming the voters tactic is a problem? Or do you think that's, again, an overblown issue?
- [12:52]
Marianne Williamson
We've all got to come out of our silos. You're a black American, a Jewish American, a gay American. Our politics needs to go back to a conversation among Americans. First of all, obviously, blaming the voters is not a good idea. There was a lot of talk at the time about how Barack Obama scolding black men was like, I don't think that's such a good idea, Barack. Right. A lot of people said that at the time. Justification and blame is not the way out of this. But I don't think it was about those groups anyway. I don't think it was about identity politics. I think it was about economics. When you have 70% of Americans who report chronic economic anxiety and you have over 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That's the deeper river of anxiety that the Democratic Party failed to address adequately, even when Harris would come up with policies that might actually be able to help in such cases. The conversation they started by saying the economy was doing well. And even in ways where it's doing well, it's not doing well in ways that truly fundamentally matter to the majority of the American electorate. That's where I think the problem lay. The problem lay in a perception that the Democratic Party was not there for people in their everyday lives who literally, I remember about a year ago, I remember reading an article and being so upset about how many Americans now need to feed their children breakfast cereal for dinner that that's all they could afford. That was bad enough. Today we've moved to a place where breakfast cereal has become too expensive for people. So there's an economic crisis for the average American in this country, and one side wouldn't acknowledge it. And that, to me, is a large part of why Donald Trump won the election.
- [14:51]
Georgia Howe
Well, Marianne, a lot of good points, and thank you so much for coming on.
- [14:56]
Marianne Williamson
Thank you so much for having me.
- [14:58]
Georgia Howe
That was Democratic presidential nominee Marianne Williamson, and this has been a Sunday edition of MORNING wire.