There’s a mini-mania going on now with Oprah Winfrey being considered as a presidential candidate in the wake of her admittedly moving speech at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards. None other than Meryl Street has endorsed Winfrey in the Washington Post:
“She launched a rocket tonight. I want her to run for president,” Streep told The Post from the ballroom right after the show ended. “I don’t think she had any intention [of declaring]. But now she doesn’t have a choice.”
My God. Are we in such despair as a Democratic party, that we are willing to put up our own Democratic version of Donald Trump, i.e, a billionaire celebrity (at least she’s self made, all kudos for that) with no government experience whatsoever, but a “name brand” attached to all kinds of products? An entertainer, as opposed to a public servant? An untried marquee name as opposed to an experienced lawmaker of many years standing?
There’s no question but that Oprah Winfrey brought herself up from humble beginnings and climbed every rung of the ladder to the top, unlike Donald Trump, who was to the manor born. She’s talented, personable, and savvy and those are skills that translate across the board of human relations into any field. But to propose, again, that the electorate do an end run around the professional and elect somebody into the highest office in the land, when the person has never previously held any office, is foolishness bordering on insanity.
It also shows that there’s a deep schism in our party about how to handle the 2020 election because right now in the Democratic party there is a deep bench but a green one — unless one considers the elder statesmen such as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. That’s problem number two.
Problem number one, and we better figure out how we’re going to deal with it sooner rather than later, is how are we going to attack the issue of what Donald Trump really is? Because there have always been two schools of thought on that, one, as Hillary opined that he was a bird of an entirely different feather, an anomaly, a circus act. The other school of thought is that he’s really the worst of Republican doctrine personified, and that it took 40 years to incubate one such as he. The Atlantic:
Is the president an unhinged wild man, an utter anomaly? Or is he actually the worst possible Republican—a particularly extreme example of all the impulses Democrats have attributed to the GOP for decades? [...] Although Democrats as a whole will likely try some combination of the two attacks, these options are largely mutually exclusive: Either the president is different in type or he is different in degree.
The problem with different-in-type is that it’s precisely what Hillary Clinton argued, with little effect. Why try that again? One justification is that when Clinton was arguing this, it was all hypothetical; now voters have had a chance to see Trump in action, so they might be more receptive. Then again, Trump’s tendencies pre- and post-election are basically the same. But treating Trump as an anomaly allows congressional Republicans to dissociate themselves from the president. Besides, if it’s as simple as pointing out Trump’s flaws, why risk a Hail Mary candidate like Oprah? Picking a candidate like Winfrey would hasten the de-professionalization of government while at the same time moving the United States closer to a state where everything is an extension of partisan politics.
If Trump is different in degree, that changes the calculus. If Trump is just an extreme version of a Republican president, then the problem lies less with him personally but with his party. It would matter much less to Democrats whether their candidate can govern than whether their candidate can win. If the Democratic bench is as weak—or more to the point, green—as it seems, there might be a more compelling case for picking a charismatic candidate who happens to be a beloved entertainer. The paradox is that party leaders are the ones putting the most emphasis on Trump as different only in degree, and these party leaders are least likely to embrace a newcomer like Winfrey.
The fact that anybody is even seriously considering an entertainer like Oprah Winfrey, with no apparent ability to govern other than a hope that whatever qualities made her a success in show business is somehow going to translate into sound governance at the federal level, is a sad indication of the shallowness of the Democratic bench. We want to win and so the idea of a charismatic candidate is particularly alluring. I understand that. I’m a Californian and I experienced Schwarzenegger and we all experienced Reagan.
Two conclusions: First, we need to seriously decide who is going to be in the running for 2020 on the Democratic ticket. Secondly, if Winfrey wants to enter public service then by all means she should do so, and seek some elective office to run for, or perhaps she could get her start by some Democratic president assigning her an ambassadorship or some such, to get her feet wet in the political world.
But to suggest that the Democrats put her at the top of the ticket in 2020 with no experience in politics whatsoever, puts us in exactly the same carnival business as the Republican party. This is wrong and we should not even consider it. Unless we’re that desperate. That’s how the GOP got into the mess they’re in presently. The day that we don’t take the high road and stand for excellence as a party, and instead copy-cat Republican opportunism and seek show biz as an answer is the day we are truly lost and I hope I don’t live to see it.
My prayer is that Winfrey herself has enough common sense and personal integrity not to consider this matter seriously.
TheDogFather has a fine diary on this topic on the rec list now.