View From Here
The only decent part of all the weekend Trump-related information barrage was seeing Rep. Steve Scalise recovering from being shot on a ball field last summer walking across the stage using hand crutches. Other than that, Dear Mother of God, what must the world think? The tell-all inside look at the Trump White House in the new book “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff, the dysfunction on display in and around the Oval Office has been too widely discussed to add more here.
However, fear not. Black women saved the nation the presence of accused pedophile Roy Moore in the Senate, and now they’ve gone and threatened to haul out the big gun, Oprah Winfrey, and the political establishment is looking either giddy or scared. After all, if a Donald Trump, why not an Oprah Winfrey, since as it’s turns out, it’s the core of the person that matters. Opponents and political professionals will try to pigeonhole her as “another celebrity candidate”, which is laughable because that’s what they crave to be as they stand in the halls of Congress for half an hour waiting for camera time on CNN or MSNBC. And they also know that the actual work of running the government is a skill that can be learned, but there is no degree for charisma, and that’s why they will attack it, because it’s the only angle they’ll have.
The toxic charisma of Donald Trump has given us a great gift, because it breaks the current mold and leads the way to the qualities needed of a president in the 21st century. And the reason Oprah springs so easily to mind is because she is the embodiment of the citizen-politician the Founding Fathers envisioned as someone who would leave their lives in the financial elite, use their skills performing a public service for the nation and then return to their former life. Public office was not meant for a political class to claim and use for their personal ambitions rather than the country’s.
Ideals are often honored more in word than in practice, and the career politicians among the Founding Fathers, thought a citizen-politician, someone undoubtedly much like themselves, to be a good idea. It would have been a great surprise to them to see that two of the citizen-politicians making the sacrifice for the nation would be a Black man who was a college professor, community organizer and first-term state senator, and now, some 242 years later, an astonishing Black woman who’s a self-made billionaire running her own media empire, but there it is.
There is a lot of condescending talk from the political class about workers having to adapt to today’s world. This is true for their work as well, because the highest level of the game today is fought on digital platforms, and their analog skills are outdated like the silent movies.
Onstage at the presidential debates, it is inevitable that viewers will sense they are looking at Oprah Winfrey presiding over what would amount to a grouping of talented cabinet candidates and future advisors.
Of course, these are the fantasies of a hopeless romantic, and right now, the identity of the Republican candidate is really in the hands of special counsel Robert Mueller, who has indicated he’d like to interview the president, meaning his investigation will wrap up and findings released before 2020.
If Trump himself is cleared of any wrongdoing, then he’ll be the Republican candidate. But if the special counsel has bad news for the president and if the Democrats don’t take their eye off the ball and win a landslide in this year’s midterms, then we will have impeachment and removal from office firmly on the table, making the eventual Republican opponent unknown at this time.
Whoever the Republicans field, after four years of conservative policies lacking all empathy for people or the environment, the citizenry will be won over by someone else from outside the political class, but this time someone whose life story and philanthropy are in tune with the priorities of their own lives. Oprah has demonstrated up close and personal, that she is the kind of person to be trusted with children, and as a citizen-politician, she would be trusted to take the helm and set the ship of state back on course to make lives better.
Oprah would be elected almost by acclimation.