Celebrity and politics don’t mix
The concept of President Oprah Winfrey is a tantalizing one. After a powerful acceptance speech from the first black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, cable news and social media were abuzz with the idea of Oprah 2020.
Having a black, female and actual self-made billionaire (as opposed to the fake one currently sitting in the Oval Office) as president lines up conceptually. She is so perfectly the anti-Trump.
A Winfrey/Trump campaign battle would make for great optics and a terrific CBS weeknight TV drama, but this is real life. I think?
Politics and celebrity are bleeding into each other and I can’t help but shudder at the dystopian reality that could be Trump vs. Winfrey.
Don’t get me wrong: I don't have any major problems with Oprah. Her story is an often-heroic and powerful one, but trading in one TV president for another doesn’t look good for the future of politics, or celebrity. Albeit it would be incredible to see a black, female commander-in-chief — and I can’t wait to see one who can form a coherent sentence at any given moment.
Entertainment and politics have often had a cosy, somewhat side-by-side relationship (see: Ronald Reagan), but we currently have a U.S. president who won’t shut up about his ratings, welcomed politicians back to “the studio,” (also known as “the White House”) and sends his lackeys like Stephen Miller on cable news with the talking point that Trump “revolutionized reality TV,” as one of the president’s achievements.
Just one more time to go over that. The president of the United States wants you to know he “revolutionized reality TV.”
Is that something to even brag about? Reality TV is terrible. Besides, what on Earth does that have to do with making world-changing decisions that affect millions of people or how big a North Korean button is?
We have become so conceited as a society, they literally had to put two cameras on phones so we could take pictures of ourselves.
Fame and celebrity are now measurable in likes, retweets and shares, giving everyone a comparable popularity metric.
Again and again I’m surprised when I hear Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson 2020 or Kid Rock running for Senate (an apparently poorly constructed “prank” which left nobody looking foolish except his own supporters who thought it was real).
If politics goes the way of reality TV, we’re all doomed. You often hear people declare, “I don’t care for politics,” in a claim of misplaced pride. Maybe these people are more likely to tune in for Oprah’s state of the union address than Bernie Sanders’, but Hollywood stars and celebrities are not a good shortcut to engaging the electorate.
Politics aren’t supposed to get good ratings. It’s an arena where our best and brightest come together to carefully and thoughtfully tackle the issues we face as a society. At least it’s supposed to be. Dale Boyd is a reporter at The Penticton Herald. To contact the writer: dale.boyd@pentictonherald.ca.