Oprah Politics
In 2008, she drafted a virtually unknown Barack Obama, and persuaded moderate voters in both parties to support him. Can she do it again?
Oprah Winfrey at the Democratic National Convention, August 21, 2024
Those of us who watched Oprah Winfrey’s stirring endorsement of Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention last summer were in for a surprise. Or two.
We were surprised because Oprah’s appearance had not been announced in advance, and our surprise, in turn, gave an otherwise drama-free (if well-staged) political ritual a little punch. And we were surprised because, with only a few recent exceptions, for most of Oprah’s career she has presented as culturally liberal and professionally nonpartisan. Keeping her ideology to herself has undoubtedly been an enormous, and well-planned, career advantage for Oprah: one of her revolutionary talents has been to fashion her celebrity as a Black woman within a post-racial culture that does not yet exist.
While she is obviously a person with a body, beliefs, and private needs, the public Oprah is as Kathryn Lofton writes in Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011), “a product.” A skilled performer and capacious public intellectual, Oprah is
a woman who blends, bends, and obliterates the line between private practice and public performance and whose aesthetics completely ignore what we have historically conceived as a great divide between what is properly religious and what is not.
A second surprise, to me at least, was that Oprah also announced that evening that she is an independent voter:
This election isn’t about us and them. It’s about you and me and what we want our futures to look like. There are choices to be made when we cast our ballot. Now, there’s a certain candidate that says, if we just go to the polls this one time, then we’ll never have to do it again. Well, you know what? You’re looking at a registered independent who’s proud to vote again and again and again. Because I’m an American, and that’s what Americans do.
It was vintage Oprah, particularly in her capacity to be familiar but also surprising. Surprise is, in fact, one of Oprah’s greatest talents. Talk shows, the television genre that allowed her to become the billionaire media mogul and cultural influencer that she is today, is a realm where surprises abound. Not unlike game shows, surprises staged on talk shows reward loyal viewers with what we now call “extra content,” an experience and a memory that other people will only know second hand. Such surprises might consist of the host doing a funny dance, missing a cue and having to improvise, encountering an unexpected guest, or an invited guest taking matters into their own hands.
Some surprises become iconic. In 1970, host Dick Cavett set up a confrontation between Playboy mogul and civil libertarian Hugh Hefner and two feminists, journalists Sally Kempton and Susan Brownmiller. Cavett expected, and wanted, sparks to fly. The surprise was that Brownmiller and Kempton had packed the audience with radical feminists who, when Brownmiller interrupted Hefner with “the day you are willing to come out here with a cotton tail attached to your rear end,”exploded in wild applause. For once, it silenced Hefner completely: he occupied himself with re-lighting his pipe until he regained his composure.
Launching her show in 1986, Oprah put a great many conversations about race in America on television that had never been consistently platformed on a major network. But she also became a genius at orchestrating surprises crafted especially for an interracial female audience. There were surprise announcements, such as the 1988 “wagon of fat,” where she visually illustrated her hard-won 67-pound weight loss by dragging a Radio Flyer filled with animal fat onstage.
But Oprah’s greatest talent was for surprise events that created joy, such as in 2004, when she gave new Pontiacs to her 300 live audience members. “You get a car, you get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car,” Oprah shouted. Dressed in red to match the red ribbons on each guest’s gift box, she marched across the stage pointing at individual guests as if leading a revival meeting.
In 2019, as part of her “Speed the Love” campaign to combat social media abuse, Oprah would surprise her Instagram followers by leaving a comment on their feeds, then broadcasting their thrilled, sometimes tearful, responses.
Oprah’s capacity for joy is, by the way, not staged. Years ago, she was seated across from me at an Alvin Ailey concert and, much like she did on her show, leaped to her feet with spontaneous and unadulterated pleasure at the conclusion of “Revelations.” Oprah is also quite genuine during moments when, along with her studio and television audience, she is being surprised by others. In 2004, Oprah’s staff threw her a surprise, on-air birthday party, with guests that included John Travolta, Jay Leno, and Tina Turner—who serenaded the boss with “Simply the Best.” In 2020, a 92-year-old Sidney Poitier made a surprise visit to Oprah’s show to read a short essay proclaiming her a genius.
At the same time, as Oprah grew more skilled at the art of surprise and built a powerful media empire, at least one person understood that Americans craved that kind of genuine touch in politics, and that a personal brand could be put to the task of accumulating political, not just cultural, power. In 1988, the same year that she gave away the cars, Oprah invited New York real estate entrepreneur Donald J. Trump on her show, possibly hoping that he would surprise the audience by announcing his evolution from businessman to political candidate. Prompted by a full-page ad Trump had taken out criticizing American foreign policy, Oprah invited Trump to discuss the upcoming presidential race, and repeatedly asked him whether he would consider running.
Trump said no, betrayed a thin understanding of the candidates who were in the race, but left the door open for a future pivot to politics. The rest is, as they say, history. One reason to watch the above clip is that you will see a much more attractive and charming Donald Trump than exists today. You will also see that Trump’s ideas have not changed one iota since 1988. At the same time, his capacity to articulate them grammatically, logically, and persuasively has deteriorated dramatically.
Trump also instantly understood Winfrey’s potential as a celebrity politician. In 1999, when—at the urging of the flamboyant political consultant Roger Stone—Trump did form an exploratory committee to run on the Reform Party ticket, he told Larry King that Winfrey would be his top choice for Vice President. "She would be sort of like me," Trump told King, as he praised Oprah’s beauty. "I have a lot of things going, she's got a lot of things going."
By then, the Oprah and Trump brands were beginning to diverge sharply. Oprah is extraordinarily successful and, as it turned out, Trump was not. Today, she is associated with kindness, love, and pleasantly middlebrow cultural tastes; he with anger, violence, and garish products that turn out to be worth very little. But Oprah and Trump inspire similar kinds of loyalty among their adherents. To return to Kathryn Lofton’s point that “Oprah” the brand is also a religion, when Trump failed to win the 2020 election, he became a religion too.
On June 13, 2023, demonstrators gathered near the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse on the day of an arraignment hearing for former President Donald J. Trump. Photo credit: Ben Von Klemperer/Shutterstock.com
As Trump turned towards the populism and nativism his 1988 comments signaled, Oprah abandoned her long-held apolitical stance in 2006 when she made herself a Democratic Party kingmaker. In October of that year, she did something unprecedented, either in the Church of Oprah or talk show TV, when she drafted then-Senator Barack Obama to run for President. Although Obama was already quietly exploring a run for the presidency, he coyly dodged the idea onscreen. Yet, when Oprah pressed him, Obama seemed to accept the charge. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “the audience cheered,” and “Obama said, `I don’t think I can say no to you.’”
It’s hard to know whether Obama could have become the successful celebrity politician he became without being drafted by Oprah or platformed by her brand. Something had to push white people, not to mention the Democratic Party, into voting for a Black presidential candidate, and it is reasonable to think that Oprah’s blessing was that thing. After all, other prominent Black politicians had tried, and failed, to secure a major party nomination before: Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes, Barbara Jordon, Carol Mosely Braun, and Al Sharpton are a few. (If you go here, you will also see a much longer list of Black Americans running as third party candidates, most prominently as socialists and communists.)
Politics are, as Julia Sonnevend writes in her book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (2024), “a site of performance, where politicians present heroes or villains on a stage to audiences who clap or boo in response.” By platforming him, Oprah allowed Obama to present himself, not as hard-working, ambitious, intelligent, and politically moderate (for he was all those things before he came on her show), but as charming. And it was Obama’s charm—his own telegenic qualities, his youth, and his admission to Oprah’s charmed circle—that helped to present him as a pleasing contrast to the grumpy, abrasive, aging Senator John McCain and McCain’s alarmingly ignorant populist running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Oprah’s blessing isn’t magic. She endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, but did not actively campaign for her. She endorsed Stacey Abrams in the final days of the 2018 Georgia Governor’s race, and did campaign with her. Both women lost. It’s worth remembering: Oprah changed our political culture, but she has elected exactly one person.
Yet, in many ways, Kamala Harris is the epitome of what Oprah politics should be able to sell. Harris’s capacity for joy, her natural charm, and ability to surprise us with a quip, a laugh, or a politely veiled obscenity is more reminiscent of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than it is an Obama. Most importantly, Harris lives politically where most Americans do, whether they are liberal or conservative: in a moderate center, not the polarized world of “left” and “right” that political media has invented over the past decade. They are independent in the truest sense, not partisan.
It’s those voters who will decide the 2024 election, and I think they’ll surprise us by voting their hearts—as Oprah would.
Follow up on Friday’s video chat:
Speaking of charm: for those of you who haven’t tuned in yet, last Friday Claire and Neil talked about how the Harris campaign has made use of a fragmented media audience to target specific voting demographics. As if by magic, Axios reporters Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild published a piece yesterday about why podcasts have become “politician magnets.” Cable cord-cutting means that voters are getting their information from a bespoke set of outlets; podcasts in particular give politicians “a friendlier setting to put forward the most attractive version of themselves.” (October 13, 2024)
Short takes:
The Olivia Nuzzi-RFK, Jr. sexting drama started off as a simple traffic accident and has metastisized into one of those fiery, multi-car pileups on the Long Island Expressway that you can’t look away from. At the Daily Beast, Harry Lambert has profiled Nuzzi and her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, a May-September political media couple who were at the top of the journalism world and have now completely and embarrassingly imploded. Everything is there: cyberstalking, the Mob, blackmail…and that’s just Lizza! Both are currently suspended from the outlets they work for, and it is destined to be a long road back. It’s a must read. (October 13, 2024)
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques ask: why is the media so focused on a 3% sliver of voters who say they are undecided, and probably aren’t, when it’s swing and low-turnout voters who will really make a difference in an election? “The percentage of undecided voters is often overestimated due to poor interpretations of the polling data by the media or poor questioning practices by pollsters,” Sonnenfeld and Henriques write at Time, but “lean towards one candidate but are open to voting for the alternative.” That’s a healthy 15% of the electorate, while “Lower-turnout voters, those who usually align with a party but vote on an inconsistent or infrequent basis, will likely be an even larger target for the candidates.” (October 11, 2024)
As we know, the Trump/Vance campaign has cloaked the GOP’s war on reproductive freedom in the language of choice—by which they really mean “states’ rights”—the states right that once gave you Jim Crow and decades of Black voter suppression. As Jessica Valenti writes at her Substack Abortion, Every Day, the idea that draconian bans on reproductive care are democratically chosen by voters at the state level is the message all the way down the Republican ballot, even among GOP candidates who are Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs like Arizona Republican Kari Lake. Lake, who is currently trailing Democrat Ruben Gallego in that state’s Senate race “has been a vocal supporter for bans—even the state’s 1864 ban—suddenly says she wouldn’t vote for a national ban,” Valenti reports. “The anti-abortion strategy we can plan to see the most of in the coming years is one of obfuscation and appropriating pro-choice language,” Valenti continues. “It will be candidates lying about their real abortion stances; pretending to support ‘choice’ and the ‘will of the people’ while working to keep voters as far from abortion as possible; and using coded language about supporting bans.” (October 11, 2024)
I hope so!