National tragedy: Marianne Williamson may be dropping out

Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP

When Huey Lewis sang about the power of love, he probably didn’t have Marianne Williamson in mind. Tragically for all of America, that power might not have been enough to push your way through a crowded Democratic primary field. First, we lost Julian Castro, and now this. While there has been no official cancelation or even suspension of her campaign, Williamson sent her entire campaign staff to the unemployment line this week, in what can only be considered a signal that the end is near. (The Hill)

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Best-selling author Marianne Williamson has laid off her entire campaign staff, according to two sources close to the campaign.

The longshot Democratic presidential hopeful will continue to seek her party’s nomination. But she’ll do so without a staff behind her. Manchester, N.H.-based television station WMUR first reported the mass layoffs on Thursday.

Williamson, an author and celebrity spiritual adviser, has been campaigning for the Democratic nomination for nearly a year. But she has struggled to break out of the lower tier of the primary field, often failing to register in national polls.

Full disclosure: The author is a Williamson campaign donor. (I sent her a dollar to help her make the first debate because I thought she would be the most entertaining one on stage. I have no regrets.)

There was talk of Williamson tossing in the towel months ago. She laid off her campaign manager back in September or October. Her fundraising had mostly stalled by the end of the summer and she raised a total of three million in the third quarter, spending almost all of it and leaving little cash on hand. Even at that stage, she was down to a couple of dozen paid staffers, far short of what a candidate needs to run a national campaign effectively.

Still, she’s not ending the campaign. She’s claiming that she’ll just go it alone. And as of last night, she was still weighing in on the issues of the day. She sent out a flurry of tweets about the airstrike that took out Soleimani. Of course, she accuses Trump of being reckless.

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Still, Williamson didn’t reserve all of her anger for the President. She blamed Congress for passing the National Defense Authorization Act, giving the White House even more power to initiate military action. Oh, and she also gets in a shot at the “military-industrial complex” reminiscent of Eisenhower.

Marianne Williamson has been highly successful as an author and clearly has quite the following as a self-help guru. But she also comes across with an air of kookiness and new age, goddess worshiping unseriousness. I don’t think she ever really shook that off in a way that would make a serious percentage of the electorate take her seriously. (Personally, I don’t think she even tried to.) It’s all well and good to speak enthusiastically about the power of love and guided meditation, but that’s not going to take out the rest of the Democratic primary field. And it certainly wasn’t going to bring down Trump.

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Best of luck on your lonely journey down the campaign trail, Ms. Williamson. You brought plenty of levity to an otherwise boring field of candidates and I, for one, enjoyed the show.

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