I am being told that people are talking about Oprah running for president. After thinking, Oh, dear heaven, no, I thought, why not? She's certainly better qualified than Trump in that she's neither obviously insane, isn't a racist, a misogynist or an LGBT basher, is in no known way a traitor on behalf of the Putin crime regime, probably has entirely more impulse control and, well, in every way she's more qualified than Trump.
And the business-woman side of it bothers me. If there's one thing that seems to be really bad in a president it's someone used to being the head of a business, though Oprah is certainly 100% more successful at that than Trump has been. She would divest herself and I suspect that her name brand wouldn't turn into instant poison as soon as she started making appointments and issuing executive orders.
That said, I'd rather have an experienced, clear headed, clear-eyed, honest politician who holds no romantic view of the U.S. Constitution and the extremely mixed history of that, the opposite view of things than that which is common among show-people.
But I doubt any of it matters in the long run as long as the conditions that created and brought us to a Trump and which has permitted him to stay in office past last April 1 are changed. Any president we elect, even the best of those, unless they appoint members of the Supreme Court who will undo the damage past courts have done - and the Supreme Court is the branch of government most responsible for producing dysgenic billionaire oligarchy governance of the united states - we're only buying ourselves and American democracy a little more time.
Any presidential candidate who doesn't realize what the past eighteen years of American dystopia means and how the Constitution as interpreted by courts over our entire history have led us into this is just a caretaker of a dying democracy, a dying country.
We haven't even done anything to require hard to ratfuck voting methods in this country, with the problem of Republican-Russian infiltration of that being on full display in many states. Democrats haven't even talked about getting rid of the goddamned anti-democratic caucuses or holding its own nominating process through secure means without Republican legislative interference. I'm not convinced that anyone's taking this seriously, at all. Relying on the U.S. Constitution to fix these things would have worked by now if it were going to, it's only been used to make things steadily worse.
If we are honest, Obama won in 2008 (and deserved to) largely because he wasn't John McCain, who has no business being in the White House except as a guest. That said, Obama spent so much time learning the job that he really was more qualified for it when he left than when he started, and it's not a job you want that steep a learning curve on. Lack of understanding of the task is why Cheney was widely seen as the real power behind the desk, and of course why no one thinks Trump does anything but watch TV and tweet about what he sees there.
ReplyDeleteOprah is not the clod of dirt Trump is (I think dirt is actually more capable of running the Executive branch), but even as a joke I don't entertain the idea of her as POTUS. We've had enough of popular people winning the biggest electoral game in the country. We need to try harder to find people who actually know what they are doing.
And then I see that Southern Beale has said what I wish I'd said on the topic.
ReplyDeleteA day late and a dollar short, as ever....
Was it Racine who made said something about cursing those who had our ideas before we did, I could write that book as my biography. I think the time I found out that William Cobbett noticed the same thing I had about Darwin only he'd said it about Malthus before Darwin wrote anything was the ultimate motivation for humility on that count.
DeleteSouthern Beale is good.