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THERE has been, of course, an enormous amount of talk about Oprah Winfrey since her truly impressive speech at the Golden Globes Sunday night, and some have proposed her as the ideal candidate for the Democrats to pit against President Trump in 2020.
Even with her candidacy far from declared, there has been a substantial reaction against this notion, with many (across the political spectrum) arguing that the nation does not need another billionaire, another political neophyte, another person who ignores and undercuts science, another celebrity, and so on. (The Guardian has a piece, which I find credible, arguing that Winfrey is an apologist for capitalism whose “empowering” stories “hide the role of political, economic and social structures in our lives.”)
In any case, if the next presidential race is a Winfrey-Trump matchup — that is, a campaign between two television start with severely limited political experience — it will further prove that one of the 20th century’s great prophets was media theorist Neil Postman, who predicted this kind of thing more than three d
ecades ago. (Postman’s most famous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, came out in 1985, and was in some ways a response to Reaganism, though his historical context goes back to Plato and Socrates.)
My opening paragraph set up the context of the rise of these kinds of people into political life:
These days, even the kind of educated person who might have once disdained TV and scorned electronic gadgets debates plot turns from “Game of Thrones” and carries an app-laden iPhone. The few left concerned about the effects of the Internet are dismissed as Luddites or killjoys who are on the wrong side of history. A new kind of consensus has shaped up as Steve Jobs becomes the new John Lennon, Amanda Palmer the new Liz Phair, and Elon Musk’s rebel cool graces magazines covers. Conservatives praise Silicon Valley for its entrepreneurial energy; a Democratic president steers millions of dollars of funding to Amazon.
I wrote about the pertinence of Postman’s vision into a 21st century he barely lived to see. (Postman died in 2003.) Here it is — written before the rise of our current president into politics, but, I hope, still relevant to the state that we are in.
I think that – from a tactical standpoint – the big problem with Oprah as a Democratic candidate for president is that most presidential elections (especially if there’s no incumbent or an unpopular one) tend to be a reaction to the previous presidency. If general election voters are unhappy with the current TV-star-with-no-political-experience president, they’re unlikely to want to vote for another one, even if the new one seems more capable.
(That doesn’t mean there’s no danger of Democrats nominating Oprah if she decides to run. I think that Democrats sometimes have a tendency to choose the primary candidate they believe will put off the other side the least. Choosing the candidate that you think will appeal to other people who don’t think the way you do isn’t a great way to get winning nominees – it’s how we got Kerry and Dukakis.)
On the other hand, in pretty much every US presidential election since 1960 (except maybe 1988), the candidate who came across better on television won. And Oprah is more telegenic than most people.