Sun Sentinel Broward Edition

Williamson may have shown Dems how to beat Trump

- Scott Martelle is an editorial writer for The Los Angeles Times.

Self-help author and political novice Marianne Williamson stands as one of the most unlikely of the two dozen people seeking the Democratic nomination for president, but on Tuesday she also delivered one of the best performanc­es. And she did it by not acting like the others.

And no, Williamson doesn’t have much chance of winning the nomination. Sure, a lot of folks said the same thing about Barack Obama 12 years ago, and Donald Trump four years ago, but those two eventual presidents worked in different landscapes, with Obama winning by selling hope, and Trump by selling fear.

Williamson is selling love, and justice, though there doesn’t seem to be much of a political market for those particular goods.

As the other nine Democrats parried back and forth Tuesday night over differing visions of how to address healthcare access — too left? too Republican-lite? — Williamson argued for a bigger view.

“Everything that we’re talking about here tonight is what’s wrong with American politics, and the Democratic Party needs to understand that we should be the party that talks, not just about symptoms, but also about causes,” Williamson said. “When we’re talking about healthcare, we need to talk about more than just the healthcare plan. We need to realize we have a sickness-care rather than a healthcare system. We need to be the party talking about why so many of our chemical policies and our food policies and our agricultur­al policies and our environmen­t policies and even our economic policies are leading to people sick to begin with.”

If the applause meter measures success, Williamson did well. She argued for reparation­s for African Americans to try to mitigate generation­s of racial injustice, and sought to put the water crisis in economical­ly battered Flint, Mich., into a broader context than the specifics of government errors and mismanagem­ent that led to a municipal water system too tainted by lead to be used safely by the black-majority city.

“I lived in Grosse Pointe,” Williamson said, referring to one of the region’s wealthier — and whiter — suburbs. “What happened in Flint would not have happened in Grosse Pointe. This is part of the dark underbelly of American society.”

And that is the underlying perversion in American politics. Trump didn’t lead a wave of nativism and political divisivene­ss, he surfed it. He is a symptom rather than the cause of a political environmen­t in which we can’t even agree on basic facts (see global warming), and in which so many elected Republican­s back a party leader who not only is incapable of telling the truth, but who abuses the power of his office (see the Mueller report, part two) and exploits dog-whistle racism (see blackmajor­ity Baltimore as a place where Trump says “no human being would want to live”).

“Our problem is not just that we need to defeat Donald Trump,” Williamson said. “We need a plan to solve institutio­nalized hatred, collectivi­zed hatred and white nationalis­m. And in order to do that, we need more than a political insider game and wonkiness and intellectu­al argument. Those things will not defeat Donald Trump. We need some radical truth-telling.”

Indeed. Elections tend to turn on emotions, and symbols, and fears and hopes. While Williamson likely won’t win the Democratic nomination, she may well have done the party a service by reminding it of the importance of making that connection with voters.

“I want a politics that goes much deeper,” Williamson said. “I want a politics that speaks to the heart, because the only way to fight — you keep talking about how we’re going to fight Donald Trump. You can’t fight dog whistles. You have to override them.”

 ?? By Scott Martelle ??
By Scott Martelle

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States