Williamson Returns, Makes Case For “Happy Warrior” Yang

Marianne Williamson is back.

The presidential campaign trail had only to wait a short few weeks before the former candidate graced early state voters again with her presence again. Williamson had withdrawn from the race on Jan. 10, but she returned to Iowa on Friday to boost her friend Andrew Yang.

Williamson and Yang appeared before a packed auditorium in Fairfield, in the midst of the seventh day of Yang’s 17-day bus tour around the state.

“Andrew’s is an important voice of the happy warrior,” Williamson told the crowd of about 240 people. “He’s an important voice of progressivism that lays it down, but lays it down with joy … He has three personality characteristics that I believe are important: his self-confidence, his positivity and his levity.”

The spiritual and self-help author made clear that she still likes the progressive candidacies of Bernie Sanders (who she endorsed in 2016) and Elizabeth Warren. But she wanted to ensure that Yang, who she developed a friendship with while campaigning this past year, remained competitive.

“You’re not necessarily determining who’s going to be president, but you are determining who’s going to be an important voice in this race,” Williamson said of Iowans. “[Warren and Sanders] are two major progressives who are going to exit Iowa, they are going to place in Iowa.”

But while Williamson was making the procedural case for keeping Yang’s voice in the process, she also made a different type of argument for backing Yang to progressive voters.

“People are exhausted,” she said of the American electorate. “I don’t believe that people really want so much someone to go to Washington to fight for them as they want someone who can go to Washington who can end the fighting.”

Several of Williamson’s points in her introduction of Yang could easily fit into others’ critiques of Warren and Sanders — that they’re too focused on a fight and on conflict with the right. Yang, she argued, was a progressive who could lead a more joyful movement that didn’t risk further dividing the country.

Williamson related some of that back to her own journey.

“I went through my years as an angry left-winger. I realized I had to evolve,” Williamson said. “I didn’t have to moderate my politics, but I had to moderate my personality. I had to ask myself, isn’t it possible to be a happy warrior? Isn’t it possible to be a happy lefty?”

Yang’s positive personality, even as he talks about dire economic and technology trends, as well as his tendency to occasionally start dancing at events, has helped keep his nontraditional candidacy afloat and competitive while many others have dropped out.

“The way Marianne talks about what’s happened in our country, and I agree with her, I actually learn from her, she’s more enlightened than I am in many many way,” Yang said after taking the stage. “She talks about this psychological and spiritual clash, and frankly, struggle and dissent that we’re dealing with.”

The choice of Fairfield for the joint event was no coincidence. The town has a large transcendental meditation community that often flocks to nontraditional candidates like Williamson or Tulsi Gabbard or — in past years — Ron Paul.

Williamson had built up quite the  following in Fairfield over the past year, holding eight events in the town of about 9,500 people. A core group of volunteers from the town often followed her around the state, and an impressive amount of her national fundraising came from Fairfield.

And her pitch for Yang may have been simply knowing her audience in Fairfield, one that values ideas of peace and mindfulness.

Much of Yang’s stump speech kept to familiar themes from his campaign, though his crowd sizes have continued to grow in the final stretch of the caucus.

“I’m a numbers guy, and when I went through the numbers, there’s a very clear and direct explanation as to why Donald Trump is our President today,” Yang said. “We blasted away over 4 million manufacturing jobs over the last number of years.”

Encouragement from Williamson could get Yang, another candidate in the outsider role that Fairfield often likes, get to viability in some of the town’s precincts. Gabbard used to visit the town often as well, but has since spent all her time in New Hampshire. That leaves Yang alone with Sanders to win over the sizable contingent of voters who prefer outsiders.

Though Yang continues to sit low in most Iowa polls, his significant spending on TV ads here have boosted his name ID to nearly that of the front-runners, and his favorability numbers are among the highest.

Given that he’s headed into caucus night far under 15% in recent surveys, it’s unlikely he ends up viable in many precincts. But thanks to Iowa Democrats now releasing the raw vote total of caucus attendees’ first choice, Yang will still have some number to point to on Feb. 3. And his barnstorming of Iowa in the final weeks should rustle up enough non-traditional voters and win over some intrigued regular caucus-goers that he ends up with a respectable result that gets people to look twice at his candidacy.

Today, Yang heads to towns rarely visited in Southern Iowa, including Chariton, Osceola and Greenfield.

by Pat Rynard, with reporting by Isabella Murray
Posted 1/25/20