Oprah on Running For President: “Now, I’m Thinking ‘Oh!'”
Oprah has more Twitter followers than Donald Trump and almost as much money. Why not challenge him in 2020?
Oprah Winfrey 2020? She’s had television ratings higher than The Apprentice. According to Forbes, her net worth is comparable to that of Trump’s, and she made it all without help from a wealthy father in the same business (or without selling her name to the highest bidder, ahem). She’s a political outsider with devoted fans hangs on her every word. She even has 10 million more Twitter followers than the current president. And she achieved all of that without any of her businesses filing for bankruptcy once, let alone six times.
On just about every measure put forward by Trump and his supporters to show he was qualified for the office, Winfrey bests him.
So, maybe it’s not so farfetched that perhaps Winfrey could one day find herself in the Oval Office.
In fact, Winfrey herself is starting to feel that way. Maybe.
In a new interview with Bloomberg Television’s David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, Rubenstein asks the media mogul if she’d ever entertained possibly running for office. She replied that she had never even gave it a thought until, well, recent developments.
“Now, I’m thinking ‘Oh!,'” said the star.
“Have you ever thought, given the popularity you have, that we haven’t actually broken the glass ceiling yet for women, that you could actually run for president and actually be elected?” asked Rubenstein.
“I….” replied Oprah at first. “I never considered the question even a possibility.”
Rubenstein then pointed out that one apparently needs no previous government experience to be President of the United States anymore.
“I thought, ‘Oh gee, I don’t have the experience. I don’t know enough,” Oprah said. “Now, I’m thinking ‘Oh!'”
It is true that tradition dictated that one would need either previous experience in government or as a military leader to reach the highest office in all the land.
It also used to be expected that one would produce detailed and deeply researched plans, policy goals and promises based on fact, and your taxes. For that matter, it used to be expected that a candidate could confidently express his mastery of complicated issues in a speech by saying more than “Trust me, no one knows more about this than me.”
Those expectations are now clearly out the window.
So why not Oprah? It seems like she put more thought into her book club choices that Trump does into an executive order anyway.
Do the Democrats even have a better option at the moment?
Of course, it’s unclear if Winfrey is actually planting the seeds for a possible run for the White House or just as stunned by the state of things as the rest of us. In any event, she is busy at the moment with her own cable network and a new role on CBS’s 60 Minutes, one in which she’ll hopefully help contribute to turning around negative opinions of the mainstream media (which might be a harder task at the moment than actually running for President). Incidentally, she’s not the only entertainment mogul who considering presidential ambitions—Disney chief executive Bob Iger is also said to be mulling the idea of seeking the highest office in the land, and as a Democrat no less.
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