Marianne Williamson is a more obscure Democratic candidate who has just qualified for the first debate by garnering donations from more than 65,000 distinct persons, and who I just learned about by catching an
interview with her on Sunday's Kasie DC program. In that interview, I was drawn in by her unique foreign policy ideas, which closely mirror mine. She has a history of political activism opposing the Iraq War back in the day and opposes our support for the Saudi war in Yemen as well, but also feels that we should have a feminist foreign policy, as in to say that we should consult with the women of Syria and Afghanistan as to what their needs are before just unilaterally and arbitrarily withdrawing all our troops from those theaters because they have potentially the most to lose from that. When she put it that way, she had my attention because that's very much what I believe the appropriate type of American foreign policy to be, and she's the only candidate, Republican, Democratic, or third party, running on such a position. Everyone else seems to be running either as an old-fashioned militarist or as basically a full-blown pacifist incapable of nuance.
I did some more research on her views on domestic policy recently, and found myself very pleased in that area as well, as she turns out to be a supporter of the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college, universal guaranteed income, and a universal savings account available to children at birth, and more, so I'm in broad agreement with her economic views as well.
Here are a couple of the useful resources (besides the interview linked above) I found detailing her background and positions on the issues:
PBS,
Wikipedia.
I especially like her foreign policy ideas and the fact that she founded the Peace Alliance and Project Angel Food non-profits. As with other Democratic candidates, there are
some areas where I disagree with her (the Equality Act comes to mind immediately), but those are few and far between on balance. Her biggest weakness though, for me, is the fact that she has no experience working in government. Our current experiment with electing such a president hasn't worked out well in my opinion. I don't want a proper Washington insider, but I do prefer that a candidate for president have
some governing experience working on behalf of millions of voters. Nonetheless I'm intrigued and want to hear more from her. I'd like to see her in June's debate! I fear I won't get the chance though, as the Democratic Party has capped the number of candidates eligible to participate at 20 and since pollsters don't bother to include Williamson's name, it's impossible for her to poll at 1% or more to meet the party's
preferred debate qualification criteria even though she is eligible by the other metric (at least 65,000 unique donors). But I hope!