Many showing thirst for a voice of reason

she got an economic development plan?” you miss the point. As Trump’s thoroughly unconventional campaign against the obviously more knowledgeable Hillary Clinton showed us, the details of policy are a snooze compared to the passion of your persuasion on the speaking stump.

But color me skeptical. The excitement surrounding Oprah says more about the appetite that many of us Americans have, after a year of the Trump presidency, for a knowledgeable, compassionate, charismatic, principled and inspiring voice of reason.

Oprah’s speech sparked a Twitter debate between the left’s many factions who questioned whether she was far left and anti-establishment enough to energize the Democratic base — as if Trump’s trashing of Republican norms have not already exposed the hazards and folly of extremism in party ranks.

But as appealing as a battle of the media titans might seem for 2020, it could also put us closer to the nightmare envisioned by Neil Postman in his classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.”

While many of us feared the “Big Brother” vision of George Orwell’s “1984,” Postman wrote that we should be even more concerned about the deceptively appealing vision of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Postman wrote, Huxley feared that “there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

At least, Oprah, who was just rising to national fame with her Chicago-based talk show when Postman’s book came out, decided to use her powers for literary good. “Oprah’s Book Club” defied conventions by using the power of television to encourage more reading of fine literature.

I love Oprah so much that I don’t think she should run for president. She’s too good for that. There are other rising talents people in the Democratic Party who can do the job of being president of the United States. Their fellow Democrats need to help them rise up and develop their White House potential and, as Oprah advises, develop their “best self.”