If Oprah Winfrey is elected president of the United States in 2020, maybe she should thank Seth Meyers. Apparently the one-time Saturday Night Live comic was kicking off Winfrey's unofficial presidential campaign at the Golden Globes on Sunday when he expressly prohibited the billionaire television host, actress and producer from running for public office.
In his opening monologue at the awards show, Meyers told Winfrey and Tom Hanks they must not run for the presidency and vice-presidency, saying the media personality and the movie star were unfit for the offices. His point was that his jokes about Donald Trump's unsuitability at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2011 have sometimes been identified as the moment the current U.S. President decided to run. So, the comic's condemnation is the best endorsement.
What was interesting was the reaction: Only Hanks looked bemused by the back-handed compliment and attempted to deflect the joke. Winfrey, presiding regally over the evening from the front row where she was acknowledged again and again by awed actors as they accepted their awards, just laughed heartily. Oprah for president? It didn't look like a stretch.
Winfrey then confirmed that impression with the barn-burning speech she gave while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for contributions to the entertainment industry. On an evening dominated by the campaign against sexual harassment in the movie industry and beyond, Winfrey's speech very neatly tied together anti-racist and anti-sexist messages, addressing the social moment in a way calculated to unite rather than divide.
Her oration was full of both powerful rhetoric and direct emotion. In the middle of a show stuffed with lines read off teleprompters and predictable shout-outs, her speech stood out as an occasion of heightened truth. If political leaders are supposed to inspire, unite and console, she sure sounded like one. By morning, her partner Stedman Graham had told the Los Angeles Times she "would absolutely do it," but it was up to the people, while CNN was reporting that confidantes said she was actively considering a run.
A stock of sentimental anecdotes always at hand, Winfrey began her speech describing herself as an awestruck little girl sitting on the kitchen floor watching Sidney Poitier win his 1964 Oscar for best actor for Lilies of the Field: He was the first black actor to ever win that award. She then pointed out that she was the first black woman to ever win the Cecil B. DeMille Award, handed out annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. (Its past recipients include 47 white men, 14 white women and three black men: Poitier, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.) So, Winfrey said, she was very conscious there were impressionable girls at home watching her that night.
From there she managed to use a thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press as a salute to the press as a source of truth, and segue to truth-telling in general. Using the example of Recy Taylor, a black woman from Alabama raped in 1944 by six white men who were never brought to justice, she drew the link between breaking down the colour barrier and the assault on sexism. And she stressed that the anti-harassment movement was not only sweeping the privileged movie industry but also championing the rights of domestic and service workers, whose legal defences Hollywood is now supporting with the Time's Up campaign. She ended with an impassioned call for the day when no one would ever say #MeToo.
Turning the aftermath of a Hollywood sex scandal into a cry for justice for all, her speech was a powerfully written piece of political rhetoric masterfully delivered: Winfrey, as the tribute video pointed out, is not only a television host but has on several occasions proved herself a highly effective actress in such films as The Color Purple and Beloved. If, in 2020, the Democrats want to fight a reactionary billionaire TV host with a progressive billionaire TV host, it's Winfrey for the win.
In other words, Winfrey is the candidate only for a nation that has accepted that fame and power are the primary credentials for the chief executive, a nation in which nobody guffaws when movie star and wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson tells Variety that he, too, is thinking of running. What's missing? Experience in government, a demonstrated grasp of public policy, political skills, including the ability to negotiate and compromise across partisan and international lines, and, most of all, a desire to serve. That is something totally separate from a desire for power, fame or popularity. It's never clear that media celebrities know the difference.
Kate Taylor