Bad idea
No.
No no no no no.
No.
No.
No.
Oprah Winfrey is thinking about running for president.
What she lacks is political experience.
In an interview with Winfrey on Bloomberg last March, interviewer David Rubenstein broached the possibility, saying “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States.”
You don’t need it to be elected, tragically, but you do need it, or a relevant education, to do it well. You can’t just walk into it because you’re famous. Have we not learned that?
It’s true that she would be vastly better than Trump. If the choice were more Trump and Oprah Winfrey I would choose her in a shot. But the choice is not that, and this idea that just anyone can be president is one that needs to die.
You would be better than Trump. I would be better than Trump. My cat would be better than Trump.
My cat’s name is Ryo if you’d like to write him in.
Bruce, my socks would be better than Trump. My socks do not have names. You could just write in “Socks”, except then people might think you were voting for the Clinton’s cat (who would also be a better president than Trump, and does have government experience, though probably not relevant experience).
The sad thing is, Oprah does have the experience and exposure to do great political work – in media, rather than elected office. And she could do it while stressing that television celebrity of course doesn’t translate to political competence. For a lot of people, for just about anyone in fact, anything you’d want to do with the Presidency can be better done, by you, doing something else entirely using skills and positions developed over time and with hard work.
The anti-intellectual, anti-skill, anti-professional bias in the U.S. has gotten so bad that, for politics, competence and experience are negatively valued by too many voters. Bad enough the right has that so bad, the left doesn’t need to catch up.
I’m not American, but what’s your cat’s surname?
Who do you hope runs in 2020? I’m thinking Gillibrand or Warren would be good.
• Vice President : Dr. Phil McGraw
• Secretary of Health Jenny McCarthy
• Secretary of Education : Rhonda Byrne
• Secretary of “Energy” : Deepak Chopra
• etc etc…
OB:
Please correct me if I am wrong, but ‘just anyone’ has never been President.
One has always needed both a public profile and good political connections in order to become President. Oprah Winfrey clearly has both. ‘Just anyone’ by definition has no more than just anyone: say no more than any of the millions of Homer J Simpsons who elected the present incumbent, President Donald J Frankentweetletrumpenstein, who is clearly not ‘just anyone’ either.
And thank Christ for that.
Maybe, as the dust settles after the nuclear war with North Korea, the Homer and Marge Simpsons of America will exercise their right to vote with a bit more discrimination.
Come on, iknklast, be serious: Trump is more qualified to be president than Socks.
(To be more specific, Trump has one more qualification: a pulse. Socks is dead. Otherwise they’d be equal.)
Skeletor, there is no provision in the Constitution that says the President must be alive…
I’d take a dead cat over the current live ass.
Stewart: Same as mine, by adoption.
Campaign slogan: It’s the naps, stupid!
Anna @ 5 – I don’t really have any particular hopes yet. I don’t much like the non-stop presidential campaign so I don’t pick a horse early. There are a lot of good possibles.
“Make America Purr Again”.
Apparently not a popular opinion, but I sort of do think “anyone” could be president.
I do have to qualify it a bit: This “anyone” would have to smart, hard-working, willing to learn, and willing to take advice.
There is a massive apparatus running the government. There are people who know how things work. A person qualified as I described could set the course and use the people there to implement their vision. You could even get a benefit from a true outsider perspective, someone who just isn’t going to 90+% click into the orthodoxy of the Democrats or Republicans. There are a lot of issues with broad support (reasonable gun control springs to mind), but it’s always the issue of one party or the other so half end up against it. Someone seen as an outsider with strong popular support might take the partisan edge off such issues.
Trump is in a lot of ways the worst test of this theory. The guy’s just the pits, the complete opposite of what I described.
Oprah? Hmmm… She’s very popular. She’s smart and very savvy but also into a lot of goofy stuff.
I could see her becoming a very cause-oriented president. Say she took up the cause of single-payer universal healthcare. Who would have a better shot at getting that through, Oprah or someone like Bernie? I could see anyone reasonably moderate cringing at the idea of telling Oprah they’re not going to make sure all the babies get the medicine they need. I think she’d have a much higher shot at getting it through. And it would probably cover crystal therapy and shakhra treatment, too.
But, yeah, I’d rather have someone who’s been doing this for a while and could hit the ground running. Not if they’re going to lose to Trumo though. Then give me frickin’ Oprah if that’s what it’s going to take.
I dunno. Some of the slogans might not translate from Cat very well…
MORE MICE ON THE TABLE
FRESH LITTER EVERY DAY
NO BELL COLLARS
DOGS ARE NASTY
SCRATCH MY BELLY
Ok, so some might still appeal to 27% of voters, but pretty much anything does, especially if it can be mistaken for a dog whistle.
Maybe it is because I’m South African, and our one good president spent most of his life in jail, but I think the fact that “Just anybody can be president” is a good thing all in all, because we don’t really know how to train good ones.
I mean Thabo Mbeki was highly educated, almost raised to the job, he had tons of relevant experience, on paper he should have been the best person we could possibly want, and he was a complete disaster.
Jacob Zuma has been a complete disaster too – but there is a sort of commonality I’ve noticed with bad leaders, and isn’t really something that can be remedied with experience and education.
Meanwhile our one good president spent most of his adult life in jail, failing to get his law degree. What he had that the other two didn’t, was an awareness of other people having skills he lacked.
Good leaders are those that aren’t so attached to being right, that they end up dismissing every criticism of themselves. Zuma slammed clever blacks, Mbeki stuffed his cabinet with yes-men, GW Bush famously figured anybody who wasn’t with him was against him, just everything Donald Trump etc…
It is why I find Cyril Ramaphosa’s calls for unity within the ANC troubling – we don’t need unity, we need competence. We don’t need more line toeing, we need fresh ideas and debate around those ideas because nobody has all the skills required to actually run a country.
And that is even more the case with the US. It is not Oprah Winfrey’s lack of political experience that puts me off her – it is the fact that her show was a public health disaster.
She routinely promoted new age crap, including alt medicine. Hell she even promoted faith healing by John of God. When Dr Oz was promoting quackery, he was doing it to get ratings, just like he learned from Oprah.
One has to have a basic respect for expertise, a genuine recognition that nobody goes into studying something like medical science for the evulz. The shear conspiracy theory level crap that Winfrey made her career selling, speaks of not having that respect.
Not having even an awareness or sense of responsibility to the harm she was willing to do for ratings. Part of that speaks to a massive lack of integrity, part of it speaks to a mindset that is exactly what is wrong with figures like Trump, Bush, Mbeki and Zuma.
Lack of specific skills can be remedied with a good cabinet, but her history is not one that would inspire me to think she would have such a cabinet. Would you really want Suzanne Sommers for health secretary?
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1776451519039968/?type=3&theater
The gushing over Oprah is rooted in the same ‘star’ mentality and brain-dead populism that gave us Trump. Yes, she’s a better person than Trump can ever pretend to be, but she’s another credulous media consumer and self promoter. Remember all the people who died following her weight-loss promotions?
Bruce @ 16 – well yes Mandela spent most of his life in jail but he also spent it on and in a political cause. That, if it’s intensive enough, can amount to an education.
But more basically, my claim isn’t that experience or education or both in combination is sufficient, only that it’s necessary. Of course horrible people who should be nowhere near government can have the right education or experience or both, but that doesn’t amount to a reason to think education and experience are not needed.