{"id":343501,"date":"2018-01-12T19:16:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T18:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/oprah-for-president-2020\/"},"modified":"2018-01-12T19:16:11","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T18:16:11","slug":"oprah-for-president-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/oprah-for-president-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Oprah for President 2020?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the wake of Oprah Winfrey’s\u00a0acceptance speech<\/a>\u00a0at the Golden Globes for her Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award on January 7, 2018, the political twitter-verse went a little bonkers predicting a\u00a0possible presidential run<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After Trump’s surprising victory, I don’t think any of us can say that she’s unqualified for the role or even unelectable. But in many\u00a0ways\u00a0she has some of the same flaws that make the Trump presidency so problematic.<\/p>\n

Oprah may be famous, but Trump has demonstrated that celebrity is a poor substitute for actual political skills. All recent presidents came to the job with larger political\u00a0tool kits. Obama had been a\u00a0US Senator<\/a>. Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were\u00a0governors<\/a>. The elder Bush had been\u00a0Vice President<\/a>. As we have seen in the chaotic first year of the Trump presidency, the Oval Office is perhaps not the ideal place for on-the-job training.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wealth is also not a substitute for competence. If Americans believe the 2020 race is merely a contest between two vain billionaires,\u00a0turn out<\/a>\u00a0could be just as disappointing as it was in 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the contrasts between Oprah’s wealth and Trump’s could not be\u00a0more stark. According to the latest estimates by Forbes,\u00a0Oprah is worth $2.8 billion<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Trump is worth $3.1 billion<\/a>. The mere $300 million difference between the two is astonishing when one considers Oprah grew up\u00a0“dirt poor”<\/a>\u00a0in rural Mississippi and was raised alternately by her single mother and grandmother. She did not have\u00a0indoor plumbing.<\/a>\u00a0Compare that\u00a0with\u00a0Trump. His father was\u00a0“one of the richest people in America in the 1970s”<\/a>\u00a0and Donald started out\u00a0with a $1 million loan from his father<\/a>, worth about $7 million today.<\/p>\n

Normally I’d worry about the chances for a woman without a family running for office. But after the\u00a0Trump family travails<\/a>, being childless looks a lot more attractive. Oprah’s advantage in not having offspring is that she doesn’t have any children to run her campaign into the ground or…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of Oprah Winfrey’s\u00a0acceptance speech\u00a0at the Golden Globes for her Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award on January 7, 2018, the political twitter-verse went a little bonkers predicting a\u00a0possible presidential run. After Trump’s surprising victory, I don’t think any of us can say that she’s unqualified for the role or even unelectable. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-343501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}