So the Democrats last hope is to run mega TV star Oprah Winfrey for U.S. President? She can’t run for any other office in the land? It has to be the absolute top spot in the federal government and the most powerful position in the world? Isn’t she already kind of our president anyway? Since recently receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, the mass media merged with show biz to gush over the possibility of running Oprah for president in 2020. To which her longtime companion Stedman Graham replied: If the people want her to run, she would do it. So there.
Well, not so fast. Powerful, attractive, intelligent woman that Oprah is, there are skeletons in her closet, and the media if they investigate hard enough will find them. Certainly her ferocious Republican opposition will. And Oprah is not running on the Republican ticket, though she’s probably benefited mightily by their policies. Oprah has never held an elected government office. Yes, she’s created and operated a media conglomerate including her own network. But given her background, I have to wonder about her ‘handlers,’—the real know-how people Oprah shrewdly hired to perform actual daily operations, because Oprah’s real job is being a well-put-together celebrity. [Pssst. I met one of her TV show handlers who confided Oprah is “high maintenance.”] Who cares, the Dems would say. Oprah is the most popular person in the universe. She would be a shoo-in as first woman president and first African-American female president. Surely our nation is ready for this by now!
Have you been reading the internet and seeing all the hate groups out there, the ones fully empowered by the Trump presidency? They are tens of millions of Americans and no fans of Oprah. Yes, Oprah will have the women’s vote but not necessarily the men, not our red-blooded, beef-eatin’ hairy American men particularly of white stock. I’m just being honest. Still, Oprah could win the U.S. presidency simply by placing her name on the ballot. Americans feel we know her. She was on TV forever.
Roll ’em
Oprah’s skeletons for scrutiny if she ran for political office include: leaving college to take a job offer in TV media, never marrying (even Gloria Steinem eventually married), former employee lawsuits claiming her business a climate of anti-male harassment (OK, that part is laughable considering the vastly common workplace scenario between the sexes), and declining to support impoverished American youth who asked for computers and bikes instead of a quality education (which she indeed provides for an all-girl school in Africa). And there’s the issue of her teen-age promiscuity that ended in the birth of a premature baby. The alt-right would give her the ol’ one-two morality punch even though Oprah’s baby boy died shortly after birth.
But the fairer sex of the American populace would be most forgiving of this and all of Oprah’s skeletons. Oprah has been candid about her entire life, we believe from watching her every day for twenty years. She does not feel one bit guilty about leaving college to do what others have done when offered a big career break, plus she eventually finished her degree after fame and fortune. She has proclaimed her longtime beau, Stedman, to be the only man in her life who always treated her with respect. By not marrying, she is certainly ‘cool,’ more interesting than if she did go through with a wedding and sign on the dotted line. The teen-age promiscuity was directly related to her childhood years of sexual abuse by several family members, about which she has divulged in painful detail. It seems once Oprah became a national sensation, a drug-addicted relative spilled the beans on her love child at age 14. The relative needed money from a tabloid and attempted to smear the big-name star. It only served to make Oprah out to be ‘every woman,’ more like regular gals than the upper classes.
Along with surviving the shame of incest and rape, her most empowering story line is her childhood poverty, once living in a home with no running water. This kind of poverty often instills in a child the big American dream, to chase stardom. And Oprah did. She was in her element in The Color Purple, again boasting that her character’s important scene about fighting off male beasts was shot in one take. Oprah could relate honestly and painfully to the character she played, a hefty black female from the early 20th century South.
Harpo productions
The one criticism about Oprah or her talk show that has left an imprint on America today (yet won’t be a campaign issue) is the condensed sound bite. Her talk show formula was not unlike Donahue or Geraldo: interview an author, celebrity, panel of experts, psychologists, and assorted regular people (called guests) with the same situation for the show’s daily theme (gay, bi, trans, addicts, family dramas, diseased, impotents, swingers, shop-a-holics, weight losers, childhood stars, social outcasts, etc.). First the issue or problem would be laid out and discussed and then experts would speak on how to make life better—Oprah always interjecting her brand of homespun yet deeply profound Christian-New Age wisdom. It worked like a charm. By 4 p.m. Central Time, viewers felt like they’d really learned something from watching Oprah. But really, we didn’t.
Unlike Phil Donahue—who left audiences in the ’70s with more questions than answers and certainly unsure of his own opinion on controversial subjects—Oprah’s quasi-educational episodes were just tidbits of information, maybe not worth a full hour of our attention. If you wanted to delve into the specific issue, read the promoted book fiction or nonfiction. But for someone who supports education as the most important thing to benefit one’s life, Oprah and her audience never grasped that higher education, like a master’s degree and doctorate, will create more doubt than answers to life’s dilemmas and mysteries. The highly educated are comfortable with doubt, the less educated frightened by it. The Oprah formula hoodwinked a generation of Americans into thinking they knew about life and stuff simply by listening to someone else and maybe empathizing. That’s not real knowledge. Real knowledge is off the couch and real life lived outside the TV box. Oprah herself really lived, really experienced life in abundance and splendor. But her tens of millions of fans not so much. So the show was a national disservice in this regard.
But, hey, Oprah is the one who introduced our nation to Barack Obama and his lovely wife Michelle way before he ran for president. He was charming and handsome and unique. She knew he had star power, plus he was a Democrat. She backed him financially, and he won two terms as President of the United States. At his first inauguration, she was spotted among the crowds, leaning on a fellow onlooker, listening to his historic speech, smiling, hazel eyes teary and aglow—she looked so proud, like she really had accomplished something monumental, perhaps the most important thing she ever did with her life.
Now, should Oprah seriously consider running for president? It is an interesting notion but one I am not inclined to support. The media should get real and stop promoting her: like they declared Hillary Rodman Clinton when she ran time and again, referring to her candidacy as a ‘coronation,’ like there was just no way she would lose especially that second time when Obama was not on the ballot. Ugh, Hillary lost to a foul-mouthed boastful rich white man, one Americans felt they knew from watching him on his TV show.
Would it be any different with Oprah? If Trump is game two years from now, he would fight Oprah the same way he did Hillary. It would be dirty, unfair, filled with lies and innuendos, and the American TV-watching public would love it. Oprah, I think, is no match for the kind of filthy politics into which we have lowered ourselves today. In a different era, perhaps someone with her stature, charisma, class and endless money could compete for the U.S. presidency. But knowing what we know now, even Oprah Winfrey couldn’t win. Oprah, after all, is above it.