OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: To Oprah Winfrey: Please don't

I've got nothing against Oprah Winfrey.

But I didn't see her speech at the Golden Globes for the simple reason that I don't watch the Golden Globes. I try not to pay any attention to the Golden Globes. Because, as I've said before, there's nothing wrong with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association--the group that hands out the Golden Globes--that a good RICO indictment couldn't cure.

I understand the HFPA has to some degree cleaned up its grifty act in recent years. Still, I'm not terribly interested in award shows and think the attention they get sucks oxygen away from more interesting parts of our film culture. I get why people watch them, why people care about them, and don't think there's anything wrong with having fun with an awards show.

Still, it's obvious that we ignore Oprah at our own peril. She may well be the next celebrity billionaire to launch herself into a political campaign. If we're to believe her surrogates--and she already has surrogates; what does that tell you?-- she's genuinely contemplating running for president in 2020.

At this point, we might snicker and allow that 2020 is a long way off. Oprah has a pretty good thing going, and making a crowd-pleasing speech in front of a friendly liberal-leaning audience is a lot different than engaging in retail politics. But just look at who's sitting in the White House now. There's never been as unlikely a chief executive as Donald Trump, who, all claims to being a very stable genius aside, won despite probably not even wanting the job.

I'm pretty sure we're at the point where name recognition is the single most important attribute a candidate must possess; it's likely that we've been that way ever since television became an important feature in American life. Yet it used to be that name recognition would only get you in the door. The American people used to put potential candidates for the highest office through a much tougher job interview.

Now there's a considerable number of Americans who've grown so cynical and jaded that they're willing to vote for the goofiest candidate--a Tommy Wiseau or a Kid Rock or a YouTuber like Logan Paul-- just for the lulz.

More and more of us just want to watch the world burn, and universal suffrage comes at a price. You give a person a vote, they can spend it anyway they want. If you've got a society that's been disconnected from traditional values such as respect for expertise, you might expect that disconnection to be reflected in its electoral choices.

When a nation's people lack a common reservoir of agreed-upon facts, cynical operatives can exploit the power of lies, which, like zombies, retain their power to terrorize even after they've been killed stone dead. (Convicted felon Joe Arpaio said just the other day that Barack Obama's birth certificate is phony. This is not true. And that it is not true does not matter.)

Americans may be as polarized now as they've been in a long time, but one thing we can all agree on is that there are a lot of stupid, gullible people out there. And a lot of them vote.

And consuming a steady diet of increasingly dumbed-down, sensationalized and eyeball-chasing cable news certainly doesn't help the situation.

An Oprah Winfrey candidacy won't, either.

I understand why she makes an attractive candidate for some people. She has a large built-in constituency, a whole lot of fans who engage with her through her persona, who have what psychologists call parasocial relationships with her. They have watched her on TV and in the movies, followed her book club, and subscribed to her magazine. They feel like they know her.

She has a lot of money. And she is very skilled at coming across as a reasonable adult. She'd be better than a lot of the alternatives.

If Oprah is as smart as I think she is, there's no way she'll blow up her presumably wonderful life to run for president. If she's smart she'll realize that her running for president is a bad idea. That she's not the cavalry that can save her country from anti-intellectual nihilism, that, in fact, her candidacy would be a symptom of that anti-intellectual nihilism. The country doesn't need a liberal manifestation of Donald Trump.

What America needs is to grow up and disabuse itself of these fantasies; to acknowledge that governance really is hard work and issues like health care and immigration are difficult. What America needs to do is to stop treating our elected officials like some kind of elite and instead treat them like employees subject to performance reviews. Employees who can be replaced if they don't meet certain standards.

We need dull wonks in Washington, people who worry about the potentially horrible consequences of their mistakes, and therefore strive to minimize the damage they could potentially do to American institutions and values.

That's a pipe dream. Politics in this country is just another form of show business, a spectator sport where an awful lot of us see only the color of the jerseys. Either party would be happy to draft Oprah Winfrey. She could help them win.

But contrary to what you might have heard, winning isn't the only thing.

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Editorial on 01/14/2018

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