Richard Dien Winfield is quick to point out that he was born in Queens, the same borough of New York City as Donald Trump. Now he wants to represent Athens, Georgia, and its rural, heavily conservative environs in Congress. “Republicans in this district were willing to support someone with no Georgia roots, a guy from Queens, talking about bringing jobs back to America,” he reasoned, so why not him?
Winfield’s slogan for his campaign is “Guaranteed Jobs, Fair Wages.” He appears to be the first candidate in the 2018 cycle to run on a federal guarantee of a job for every able-bodied American adult who wants one. Winfield, a philosophy professor at the University of Georgia for 35 years and the author of The Just Economy, will kick off his campaign the weekend before the Martin Luther King holiday, and that’s no accidental timing. King endorsed “employment for everyone in need of a job” during the civil-rights era, and his widow, Coretta Scott King, co-founded the National Campaign for Full Employment in 1974.
