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    Tulsa Creates Commission on Reparations for Race Massacre

    The NewsThe mayor of Tulsa, Okla., announced on Thursday the creation of a commission tasked with developing a plan for reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history. The commission will study how reparations can be made to survivors of the massacre and their descendants, as well as residents of North Tulsa.Community members, activists, city leaders, clergy and children prayed in 2019 beside two grave markers for victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesWhy It MattersDuring the 1921 massacre, white mobs burned Greenwood, a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street, to the ground. As many as 300 Black people were killed, hundreds more were injured, and thousands were left homeless. City officials, historians and the courts acknowledge that the massacre has led to generations of racial inequity in Tulsa.Calls for reparations in Tulsa are longstanding and have resulted in apologies, a scholarship program and other actions, but not direct financial redress.The last two known survivors of the massacre, now centenarians, have pursued reparations through the courts, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their case in June.Two reports — one from a commission created by the State Legislature in 2001 and one by a group of Tulsa residents in 2023 — recommended reparations, including financial compensation. The commission announced Thursday, named the Beyond Apology Commission, follows the 2023 report’s calls for the city to create a group to examine and carry out a reparations program.Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican, has signaled that he wants this body to make recommendations that would result in tangible action. He wrote a social media post this week that the commission is not intended to be merely a “study group.”He also noted that part of the group’s mission is to produce a plan for a housing equity program by the end of November. (The mayor, who created the commission by executive order, is not seeking re-election, and his term will end in December.)Funds that could be used for that program have already been approved by voters, the mayor said.The debate over reparations has at times divided the city. In 2021, a dispute over who should compensate the survivors and their descendants preceded the sudden cancellation of an event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the massacre.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Mulling Reparations, California Sets Aside $12 Million as a Start

    Direct cash payments are not imminent, but under the state’s new budget, the money could go toward other reparations-related proposals pending in the Legislature.Last year, a California task force issued a seminal report urging reparations for Black residents that could add up to hundreds of billions of dollars. But the state’s new $298 billion budget, signed Saturday after a woeful run for California finances, is offering a much more modest beginning: $12 million.The budget does not call for immediate cash payments for Californians whose lives were shaped by injustices. Instead, it promises some state money if lawmakers agree on proposals that supporters see as early steps to repair the consequences of California’s past.The state’s approach has drawn criticism as offering far too little in the face of a sprawling, methodical report that laid bare a troubling history and offered recommendations on how to make up for it. Some lawmakers, though, have nevertheless welcomed the money as a start after the state scrambled to close a $47 billion shortfall.“I thought it was a win,” Assemblywoman Lori D. Wilson, a Democrat who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus and represents a Northern California district, said in an interview on Saturday. “To see it in the budget means that we were listened to.”Though many state lawmakers have, for now, eschewed seeking direct cash payments, they have pressed for ideas like creating a California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and prioritizing Black people for professional licenses, “especially applicants who are descended from a person enslaved in the United States.”On Thursday, the Legislature placed on the November ballot a proposal to amend the State Constitution to ban involuntary servitude, even for state prisoners. The measure is part of a reparations package that the Black Caucus announced in January. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Supreme Court’s Rejection of a Disputed Legal Theory on Elections

    More from our inbox:Race and ClassDemand Tax Relief‘Make Reading Fun Again’The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllThe case will have no practical impact in the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. The state has waged many battles over redistricting.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Court Rules State Control of U.S. Voting Has Limits” (front page, June 28):Several high-profile cases were decided by the Supreme Court this month, but only one, Moore v. Harper, had the potential to affect the very lifeblood of our democracy — voting. This election law case considered, in part, a controversial constitutional theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.At issue was whether or not state legislatures had absolute power with no electoral oversight authority by state courts to regulate federal elections. With unchecked power, state legislators in key swing states could have rejected the voters’ slate of electors and appointed their handpicked substitutes.The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect our democracy. By rejecting the dangerous independent state legislature theory, the court safeguarded state-level judiciaries, shielding the will of the voters in the process.Jim PaladinoTampa, Fla.To the Editor:In the 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, the fact that a supermajority including both Democratic and Republican appointees reaffirmed the American constitutional order is the latest example that the Republican-appointed justices are not in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and the extreme right of the Republican Party.This should provide comfort for those who believe in the separation of powers as prescribed in our Constitution.John A. ViterittiLaurel, N.Y.To the Editor:Adam Liptak writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling that soundly dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory.The article quotes Richard L. Hasen, a U.C.L.A. law professor and leading election law scholar, who said the ruling giving the Supreme Court the ultimate say in federal election disputes was “a bad, but not awful, result.”It seems globally accepted that legal disputes, including election disputes, should be decided by courts, and that in federal democracies, the highest national courts are best suited to have the last word in federal election cases.While it is common for politicians and lawyers worldwide to dismiss international best practices based on the uniqueness of their legal systems, in the U.S., too, only the Supreme Court can ensure consistency across all states and thus protect the integrity of federal elections.Jurij ToplakNew YorkThe writer is a visiting professor at Fordham University School of Law.To the Editor:In your article the Supreme Court justices whose opinions pose a threat to voting rights and democracy are referred to as “conservative.” The justices’ positions are not “conservative,” if conservative refers to those who are committed to preserve traditional institutions, practices and values.I would ask that The Times consider a better word to describe these justices, whose positions on legal issues are heavily influenced by considerations of preserving Republican rule, class structures and Christian ideological dominance.Cindy WeinbaumAtlantaRace and Class Pablo DelcanTo the Editor:Re “Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, June 26):Providing support for those who have been hurt by past discrimination is an important step in alleviating the harm caused by America’s long history of racism.However, including all who are economically disadvantaged in any initiatives, as Professor McWhorter suggests, will broaden support for affirmative action programs while assisting more people who need a hand up.Ignoring this slice of the populace is what has led to simmering resentment in many communities and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.Rather than pitting groups against one another, we should strive to lift up the fallen, regardless of the origin of people’s suffering.Edwin AndrewsMalden, Mass.Demand Tax ReliefHomeowners 65 or older with income of less than $500,000 could qualify for a property tax cut of as much as $6,500 a year.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Property Taxes Could Be Cut in Half for Older New Jersey Homeowners” (news article, June 22):As a suburban homeowner in Nassau County in New York, I find it reassuring to see neighboring New Jersey working hard to address the problem of high property taxes. It just approved a property tax reduction program for homeowners 65-plus called StayNJ, designed to offset some of the highest property taxes in the country.The people of New York State must demand that their elected officials pass similar relief for their constituents, who also live in a state with high property taxes. We are still suffering from a $10,000 state and local taxes deduction cap on our federal income tax that was passed under former President Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats promised to repeal this as one of their legislative priorities and have failed to keep their promise so far. So it is up to us to demand action from the New York State Legislature.Philip A. Paoli Jr.Seaford, N.Y.‘Make Reading Fun Again’To the Editor:Re “13-Year-Olds in U.S. Record Lowest Test Scores in Decades” (news article, June 22):The latest data is out on reading scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S., and it’s not good. Children’s reading levels are at their lowest in decades.In your article, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics states, “This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”Indeed, we see this challenge every day in the faces of children in our homes, schools and communities. We are responding by bolstering instruction, tutoring and summer learning, all of which offer reason to hope.But what stood out to me most in this story was that fewer kids report reading for fun, with 31 percent saying they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared with 22 percent in 2012.Could reigniting a love for reading and the joy of books be an answer we’re missing to this problem? Imagine every child with an abundant home library, cuddled up with a parent or under the covers reading a book, starting from birth.At a time when our education system is struggling, and life is hard for so many children, let’s make reading fun again!Mary MathewDurham, N.C.The writer is director of advocacy for Book Harvest, which provides books and literacy support to children and families.The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllAn AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “As German Worries About Future Rise, Far-Right Party Surges” (news article, June 21):The expanding and emboldened far-right element in Germany is not solely a concern for Germans; it is also troubling for the international community in general and Jews in particular.Extremism fueled by xenophobia and a deep sense of nationalism in a country that carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is foreboding and a grave threat to democracy.With global antisemitism increasing at an alarming rate and Nazism experiencing an unsettling resurgence, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the political gains that it has made are a proverbial red flag.When extremism becomes normalized and gains a foothold in the mainstream political arena and people flagrantly fan the flames of fanaticism, we have a societal and moral obligation to sound the alarm.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa. More

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    What Will Marianne Williamson Do Next?

    Marianne Williamson was invoking Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy and Thoreau, barefoot in a brownstone in Brooklyn. “If everything you’re doing is making everybody happy, you’re not doing the right stuff yet,” she said to a room of about 30 people.That September day, Ms. Williamson, the author, spiritual teacher and erstwhile presidential candidate, was wearing dramatic draping sleeves like a wizard’s. The attendees were mostly writers, including the playwright Leah Nanako Winkler and Derek Simonds, the showrunner of “The Sinner,” and were there by private invitation.What drew this crowd was the same thing that has pulled audiences toward Ms. Williamson for almost 40 years. It was the first time she had spoken at an in-person event since the pandemic began, a radical change for a person whose career is tied to public speaking. What Ms. Williamson ultimately advised, knowing her audience, was this: that each of us should sit down and pray, “Dear God, let me write one true sentence.”Ms. Williamson, 69, presents with the same fire that has fueled her career from the beginning, when she made a reputation for herself speaking around Los Angeles in the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis hit. (“In a very real way, gay men in Los Angeles gave me my career,” she said in an interview.)After ending her presidential campaign in January 2020, Ms. Williamson moved from New York to Washington, D.C. (by way of Iowa), where she has continued her speaking career on Zoom and churned out a virtual tsunami of content, including a daily newsletter, a morning meditation and a podcast with a political focus.But it was her presidential run that raised her profile, and earning potential, exponentially. Many Americans encountered her for the first time, via the persona — the parody version — that quickly enveloped her, that of a crystal-worshiping, anti-vaccine (this was pre-Covid vaccines), new-age weirdo who would dare talk about love in a political debate. Who would dare to make love the very center of her platform, in fact.Ms. Williamson announcing her presidential campaign at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, Calif.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThinking BigI first met Ms. Williamson in Los Angeles, late in the fall of 2017, at a conference called Summit, hosted by four tech entrepreneurs. Ms. Williamson was scheduled to give a speech.Before it began, I was looking for a seat when a woman introduced herself to me as a friend of Ms. Williamson’s. Earlier that day, she said, Marianne had broken her toe, so she was likely to speak sitting down, rather than pace the stage as usual. Yet a few minutes later, there was Ms. Williamson, pacing back and forth in stunningly high heels. She stayed on her feet the whole time, as if nothing were the matter at all.Ms. Williamson became famous at 40, when she published her first book, “A Return to Love,” and Oprah Winfrey, pre-book club, had her on the show. The book was inspired by and based on “A Course in Miracles,” by Helen Schucman, which Ms. Williamson credits with saving her from a rootless youth of cabaret singing and “bad boys and good dope,” as she writes in the book. (No more than what others of her age were doing, she is quick to clarify now.)But though she began by writing about miracles and is now preparing to write a book about Jesus — “for people who do not necessarily relate to the dogma or the doctrine of the Christian religion” — she is very direct about one point. “I’m a Jew,” she said. “You’re born a Jew, you die a Jew.” Her spirituality is intended as ecumenical, and she has been building and refining it for decades. She sees her effort to branch out into politics — running for a California congressional seat in 2014, then for president in 2020 — as a natural extension of her earlier work.“Spirituality isn’t some lane off to the side somewhere,” she said. “It’s an understanding of the dynamics that underlie everything. This isn’t a matter of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if America decided to change?’ It’s a matter of ‘We must change, or we will lose it all.’”Diagnosis: ‘Kooky’One of Ms. Williamson’s top Google hits to this day is from The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts humor column, in which she is fictionally quoted as saying, “I’d like to reallocate the government money that we’re spending on vaccinating children to something useful, like taking mediums underwater to ask eldritch spirits, ‘Who are we? Why are we all here?’”Ms. Williamson has never been easy to categorize, and she believes there are deeper reasons for her ridicule. “Those who were invested in calling me kooky didn’t do it because they thought what I was saying was silly,” Ms. Williamson said. “Making me appear ridiculous was the chosen way to marginalize my message.”It was one week after her Brooklyn salon, and we were in the dining room of the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. There was extra security in the lobby and temporary metal detectors — it was rumored the Israeli prime minister was in the hotel — but Ms. Williamson had entered casually, having shown her required proof of vaccination.On that subject, by the way, she said that her views on vaccination are an example of the ways in which she has been misrepresented. During her campaign, before the coronavirus had entered the picture, Ms. Williamson called mandatory vaccinations “draconian” and “Orwellian,” but then walked her position back on Twitter the next day: “I am sorry I made comments which sounded as though I question the validity of life-saving vaccines. That is not my feeling and I realize that I misspoke.”Now, she told me, “it was one of several areas where the truth of who I am was deeply mischaracterized.” She also acknowledges, however, that she has questioned the pharmaceutical industry in the past, including the safety of some vaccines. In 2012, as Andrew Kaczynski reported on CNN.com, “Williamson said she ‘agonized’ as a mother over the decision to vaccinate her children and that she could see ‘both sides’ of the issue.”More recently, Ms. Williamson alluded to this background when she said to me: “What big pharma does, if you make any statement questioning the safety of vaccines, they call you anti-vax.”And don’t get her started on the crystals. “In all of my books, and in thousands of my online lectures and seminars,” she said, “you will never find the word ‘crystal.’” (On this point, I’ll have to take her word for it, such is the volume of output.)The Outsider OnstageThroughout her presidential campaign, she was dogged by criticisms that went beyond crystals: that she had been controlling and temperamental at organizations she created in the 1990s to provide free services to AIDS patients; that in her spiritual teachings, she had made some of her followers feel they should have been able to will away their disease; that her book on weight loss was anti-fat. And, more generally, and perhaps more fatally, that with her lack of political experience and her emotion-based language, she simply did not belong on that stage.Nothing could have highlighted her outsider status more than the optics of the first Democratic debate, in Miami, in the summer of 2019. In contrast to the unbroken line of candidates in dark blues and blacks, she wore a sea foam green suit and stood on the very edge of the stage. She did not speak at all until minute 14 of the broadcast, when she could be heard saying, faintly, “I’m sorry,” in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the discourse about student loan debt.Ms. Williamson at the first Democratic presidential debate in Miami in 2019, with fellow candidates John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut it wasn’t until Minute 27, well after a cringe-worthy intervention by Kirsten Gillibrand on Ms. Williamson’s behalf, that Ms. Williamson was finally granted the floor. This was when she was able to make her larger point: that the Democrats weren’t going to beat Donald Trump with a “shallow” health care plan. “Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have a health care system in the United States,” she said. “We have a sickness care system in the United States.” Her first answer of the night earned rousing applause.Many of Ms. Williamson’s admirers are drawn to her progressive positions and the refreshing and unapologetic way in which she expresses them. She is against the “military industrial complex.” She has called for reparations for Black Americans since 1998 when her book “Healing the Soul of America” was published.“I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from American black citizens and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens,” she writes in that book. “We do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid. What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries?”She was asked about reparations in the second Democratic debate. “It’s not $500 billion in ‘financial assistance,’” she said, echoing the moderator’s phrasing. “It’s 200 to 500 billion dollars of payment of a debt that is owed.” Around the time of the debate, she told me, she had been acutely aware that “race in America was about to blow.”Sipping an Arnold Palmer at the Regency, Ms. Williamson recalled that running for president was both inspiring and scorching. She was exhilarated by the primary state voters and their commitment to their role in American politics, but at the same time, “it is such a brutal and brutalizing experience to run, and in my case even more so,” she said.“I was the most Googled person in 49 states after the second debate, and clearly someone very high up said get that woman off the stage. If I had been in the third debate, I think I might have been an inconvenience to a few people.” Along with other candidates, she didn’t qualify because her campaign did not meet certain finance requirements.Ms. Williamson ended her candidacy on Jan. 10, 2020. By then, rumors of an infectious new virus were growing more insistent every day. She had run out of money, and most of the infrastructure of her campaign was gone.But Ms. Williamson now says she regrets stepping down when she did. At the very end, when she was deciding whether to quit, she noticed that it was her female friends who urged her to be done with it already and her male friends who urged her to keep going, often with sports analogies, like “you still have time on the clock.” Which amused her, because she knows next to nothing about sports. “I didn’t enter the race with the a tough enough skin,” she told me.“When people lie about you and create false narratives about you and misrepresent you, is that bruising? Yes. However, what is that compared to the fact that the Taliban has announced they are going to start public executions and cutting peoples’ hands off again? I have perspective.”And yet. “It took me a year to forgive myself and others,” she said.Molly Matalon for The New York Times‘Car Mechanics’ of WashingtonThe next time I saw Ms. Williamson, she seemed more guarded, more vulnerable, and a touch more exasperated than she had in New York. We met in her home in Washington, a modern glass-walled apartment less than a mile from the White House. She moved into it soon after ending her candidacy, she said, so she could “keep an ear to the ground.”To her, Washington is still essentially business as usual. “D.C. has a lot of good political car mechanics,” she said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that the car is on the wrong road. The car is heading towards a cliff.”The week before, the Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel had tweeted a photo of Ms. Williamson and Andrew Yang, onstage at an event for Mr. Yang’s new book. Mr. Weigel quoted Ms. Williamson saying, “We don’t want to be Jill Steins, but in any other country, any other advanced democracy, they have multiple political parties.” The tweet predictably triggered speculation about what, exactly, Ms. Williamson intends to do next.She may not want to be Jill Stein — the Green Party candidate whose presidential run is often cited as a reason Mr. Trump won — but she also doesn’t want to dismiss Jill Stein. After all, Ms. Williamson said, “we need a viable other. I support any third-party effort that makes a thoughtful, articulate critique of the fundamental flaws in contemporary capitalism and its effects on people and the planet” When she ran for Congress in California, in 2014, it was as an independent.Ms. Williamson sees the two-party system of today as blighted and controlled by corporate interests. “Republican policies represent a nosedive for our democracy,” she said. “And Democratic policies represent a managed decline.” And yet she also believes that this is the year it will change. “The status quo is unsustainable,” she said. “There is too much human despair out there.”She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again, and dodged the question over the course of our many conversations. About two weeks ago, when Politico published an article suggesting that President Biden would face a primary challenge from a progressive candidate, “such as former Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner, 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson or millionaire and $18-an-hour minimum wage advocate Joe Sanberg,” Ms. Williamson declined to comment.James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, is skeptical. “She ran before and she didn’t get a lot of votes,” he said. “She’s kind of an interesting person to say the least, but I don’t think politics is her calling. She always struck me as a new age Bernie Bro.”In some ways, Ms. Williamson is like a Rorschach test: Many thrill to her message, while others doubt her sincerity and believe she is feeding into the speculation about a second presidential run only in order to linger on the stage.Ms. Williamson campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019. She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again.Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesThe night Mr. Trump was elected, Ms. Williamson was speaking at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, as she did every Tuesday. A childhood friend, Geri Roper, was in the audience. Afterward, “sad and shocked,” the two women drank Lillet and Perrier cocktails at the bar at the NoMad Hotel, Ms. Roper recalled. “You should run for president,” Ms. Roper told her friend.There are a lot of things, big and small, that Ms. Williamson does not want in the public discourse. She is particularly private on the subject of her daughter. A single mother, Ms. Williamson has never revealed who her daughter’s father is, and is in fact a bit touchy on the subject — on the grounds of, this is 2022, why should she or any woman have to explain?Her daughter, India Williamson, 31, is newly married and is working toward a Ph.D. in history in London. She watched her mother’s campaign closely, and the two were in constant contact. She called the characterization of her mother as a woo woo new-age type in some of the media coverage of her as “so off the mark that it was humorous.”“She’s not crystal fuzzy,” she said, describing her mother as a fearless businesswoman. “The thought of her as the crystal lady is just not the woman I’ve known since the day I was born.”Though Marianne is guarded about her personal life, an accidental “we” slipped out when I asked her where she was on Jan. 6, as in “we watched it on TV like everyone else.” She may not reveal much about her intimate life, but she lights up when she talks about her father, the late Houston immigration lawyer Sam Williamson, whose politics still reverberate throughout her own.A favorite story of Ms. Williamson’s is from 1965, when American involvement in the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding. “I came home from school in the seventh grade, and I told my parents that my social studies teacher had said that if we didn’t fight on the shores of Vietnam, we would be fighting on the shores of Hawaii,” she said. “And I proceeded to explain to them the domino theory. My father’s face turned so white and he stood up, and said to my mother, ‘Dammit Sophie Ann, get them visas, we’re going to Saigon.’”The family flew to Vietnam, where Ms. Williamson remembered that her father “explained to us that the war was wrong. And he explained to us about the military industrial complex. And he explained to us about American imperialism.” Afterward, her mother said: “Sam, now that the children are adequately informed about the military industrial complex, can we please stop in Paris on the way home?”Ms. Williamson’s childhood friend Carrie Shoemake wasn’t particularly surprised when Marianne’s father took his family to Vietnam to witness the war. “The spirit of right and wrong moved more strongly in their family than in any other family I’d ever hung out with,” Ms. Shoemake said.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesThe ‘Horse Race’Ms. Williamson was resistant to providing a lot of details about how her campaign had affected her, perhaps because she didn’t want to sound self-pitying.Only after several repeated questions did she tell a story about the day when she was in her hotel room in Los Angeles and she turned on the news and there, Joe Lockhart, a former presidential press secretary, was saying she was “dangerous and crazy.”“I just sat there with my jaw dropped open,” she said. Later, she DM’d him. He replied, Ms. Williamson, said: “The difference between you and me is that my politics are based on logic and yours are based on feelings.”“I thought: This man knows nothing about my politics.” Ms. Williamson paused. “But that’s just part of politics.” More important to her, she said, were experiences on the other end of the spectrum. Like the woman who sent $10 to support her campaign and wrote, “When I get paid next week, I’ll send another ten.”In New York, Ms. Williamson had told me: “I’m not at an age where I can take any more five- or 10-year detours. I’m at an age where, whatever the last chapter is, it has to be deliberate, intentional and well done.”Asked again, this week, if she was ready to announce that she intends to run for president, she just laughed and declined to answer. Later she sent a text. “The media is always interested in the horse race, but to me that’s not what matters most,” it read. “What matters most is not just the who but the what. The ‘what’ is that we have someone, both as a candidate and as a president, who stands for a fundamental course correction.”So, that means … what, exactly? The text ended with this: “Whatever role I can best play in that is the role I’d like to play.” More