On Sunday night’s “60 Minutes,” a panel of Michigan voters spent 20 minutes discussing their political differences on screen. It was a moving segment and a powerful one, but it wasn’t all that novel if you’ve been paying attention to the political divide over the past year. The power came not really from what the panelists were saying but who the moderator was: Oprah Winfrey.
Listening, asking, speaking without judgment, trying to find common ground — it was a superb performance by Oprah, and I use the word “performance” advisedly. She was dazzling in exactly the way that Oprah could always be dazzling, finding a tone appropriate for the moment without being heavy-handed.
If any figure in the United States bears watching over the next couple of years as our political culture continues the radical transformation that led to the election of Donald Trump, it’s Oprah. I believe she’s uniquely positioned, should she wish to commit herself, to seek the Democratic nomination for president and challenge Trump in 2020.
If you think that Trump can be beaten by a two-term governor of a Midwestern state with really good ideas about health care, or by a senator who really attracts young people, think again. The idea that a relatively conventional elected official will differentiate herself from Trump by dint of her seriousness or that an unconventional elected official can out-populist Trump is crazy.
If you need to set a thief to catch a thief, you need a star — a grand, outsized, fearless star whom Trump can neither intimidate nor outshine — to catch a star. We’re through the looking glass here. America is discarding old approaches in politics. Democrats will have to do the same to match the mood to the moment.
And that’s where Oprah Winfrey comes in. She is the mirror image of Trump, but more so. Of course, she’s female and he’s male; she’s America’s generous aunt and he’s America’s crazy uncle. And yes, she’s black and he’s white, she’s liberal and he’s whatever he is.
It goes beyond that. He’s rich and she’s rich, but she made her $3 billion herself and with no controversy. She is, in herself, the embodiment of the American Dream. He got famous from TV, and so did she, but she became vastly more famous and vastly more successful at it.
She went from Oscar-nominated actress to queen of tabloid TV. Then, sensing a cultural shift, in 1993 she dropped the bleak stuff and turned her show into a parade of the positive, with happy celebrity interactions and relentless guidance toward self-actualization (“be your best self”). Her cultural standing broadened and deepened when she assumed the mantle of book-publishing savior with her monthly novel selection. Then she became a magazine mogul. Then she became the manager of an entire cable network named for her.
As for politics, it’s worth remembering that Oprah played a not-insubstantial role in the 2008 election. Her decision to endorse Barack Obama after his campaign failed to catch fire in its first eight months in 2007 provided the initial accelerant that took him from 25 points back to winning the nomination away from Hillary Clinton.
She introduced Obama to the Hollywood crowd in September 2007 at a $3 million fundraiser. And that December, she spent four days with him in the key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In the latter, Winfrey helped bring 30,000 people to a stadium to make it clear to women and African-Americans that he was her guy. His victory in South Carolina was probably the key moment for his campaign.
A 2008 study at the University of Maryland suggested that Winfrey herself was responsible for more than 1 million votes cast for Obama in the Democratic contest — which suggests he might not have prevailed had she not campaigned on his behalf.
A Trump-Oprah contest cannot just be one of personalities. Trump did not just win due to his. His embrace of voter anger and the idea he would “Make America Great Again” gave his candidacy a fiery aspect no Republican could match and against which Hillary Clinton never found the right weapon.
Oprah would need that, too. She can’t just be the anti-Trump. She would have to find a transcendent message of her own that rose above Democratic constituent service and spoke to the right people in the right states to take the fight to Trump’s underbelly.
She can do it — in theory.
The question is: Would she want to?