President Oprah?
She shot down idea in fall; partner says ‘it’s up to the people’
After this weekend’s speech at the Golden Globes, some people say the time is right.
It sounds so simple: If Donald Trump can win the presidency, why couldn’t Oprah Winfrey?
A day after her rousing speech at Sunday’s Golden Globes, speculation about Winfrey’s potential White House aspirations sparked instant handicapping among Washington insiders.
Winfrey, 63, is younger than some of the top Democrats who might run, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, told followers on Twitter.
He also suggested she might stand a better shot in the primaries.
“Sounder on economics than Bernie Sanders, understands Middle America better than Elizabeth Warren, less touchy-feely than Joe Biden, more pleasant than Andrew Cuomo, more charismatic than John Hickenlooper,” he wrote.
Ezra Klein, editor at large of the Vox online news site, said Americans were already “tired of having a celebrity with no political experience fumbling around as president.
“Not sure Oprah (or Tom Hanks, or Mark Cuban, etc) will be a compelling answer to that,” he tweeted.
Winfrey meets the constitutional tests to run for president: She’s over 35 years old, she’s a U.S. citizen, born in the United States, and she has lived here for more than 14 years.
Her wealth and fame would be enormous assets, just as they were for Trump. Her net worth is $2.8 billion, according to Forbes.
But much of the Oprah 2020 chatter ignores the hard realities of running for president, even for one of the nation’s best known and most popular celebrities.
To millions of Americans, she might seem familiar after decades of hosting a TV talk show, acting in Hollywood movies and now reporting as a special correspondent on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Beyond the news media’s scrutiny of her personal and professional life, opponents — including a large field of Democrats — would compile dossiers on her past, timing the release of embarrassing details to inflict maximum damage.
“My experience with celebrities is they’re enamored with the talk and with the thought of being president or governor or what have you, but when they step up to the line and they understand the scrutiny they have to go through … they back away,” said John Weaver, a top strategist in the presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Winfrey, who supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for president, has shot down past speculation that she might run.
“There will be no running for office of any kind for me,” she told her best friend, Gayle King, in October on “CBS This Morning.”
But after Winfrey’s Golden Globes speech Sunday on the national upheaval over sexual harassment, her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, told the Los Angeles Times: “It’s up to the people. She would absolutely do it.”
It would not be easy. Thousands of hours of video, some never seen by the public, would instantly become fodder for attacks.
In a campaign, little-noticed banter from long ago can turn toxic.
Trump’s campaign nearly collapsed when a recording surfaced of him telling “Access Hollywood” anchor Billy Bush that he got away with sexually assaulting women because he was famous.
Even so, for Democrats in early voting states, and perhaps for a public that largely disapproves of Trump’s job performance, the notion of a popular media figure as a presidential candidate is not as strange as it once seemed.
“Look, it’s ridiculous — and I get that,” said Brad Anderson, Barack Obama’s 2012 Iowa campaign director. While he supports the idea of Winfrey running, it would also punctuate how Trump’s candidacy has altered political norms.
Winfrey’s speech as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award on Sunday touched on her humble upbringing and childhood wonder in civil rights heroes.
But it was her exhortation of the legions of women who have called out sexual harassers — and her dream of a day “when nobody has to say ‘me too’ again” — that got some political operatives, in early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, thinking Winfrey might be just what the Democrats need.
The attacks on Winfrey were swift. Some conservatives mocked her online, posting photos of Winfrey with former movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who was disgraced by multiple allegations of sexual abuse that helped set off the #MeToo movement.