Oprah 2020 / Oprah 20/20

We have this pernicious tendency to conflate cause with effect.

And this tick, makes us leap headlong to stop a person like Oprah from running (as if by stopping her candidacy we could somehow rescue ourselves from the from the political reality of people like Trump).

But that reflex is a false one — one rooted in hurt, and of a phantom pain of the world we’ve lost, where presidential candidates had JD’s and sterling credentials,…and what could’ve been in a Clinton presidency.

But make no mistake, time only flows in one direction. And we can either understand where our liberal ideologies fit in this new paradigm, or yet, again, get swept away by our almost pathological inability to understand in which direction the current flows.

Whether she runs or not, her actions — however noteworthy, did not open the door for a different bar for what makes someone a President. Trump’s did.

Her actions just walks through the door that we, as Americans, left open.

Now, we can — out of a sense of frustration — scapegoat the idea of her running as an embodiment what’s wrong with our democracy…use this moment to feel self-satisfied, that we have done our due diligence to be back the march of celebrity into our political sphere, or we can face the very real reality that it has been a part of our political sphere for a very long time.

This is why it’s very important to be intentional about what we’re seeing here. Oprah’s potential run is not a new disease that plagues our democratic process, but a symptom of it.

As such, her decision to seek the Presidency can no more be said to be a cause of the institution’s decline as a cough can be said to be the cause of a cold.

👉🏽 Trump’s election is the cold — what has birthed this new state of affairs.

👉🏽And our unchecked, century-long love affair with celebrity is what compromised us enough to make it possible.

But to admit that, would be to admit that we have no one else to blame but ourselves. So instead, what do we do? We displace our energies over those things by fighting the idea of Oprah running…

😒 by rifling through her past and find something that makes her ‘unfit’ to run…

😠 or seeking impugn those who seek the light of a person of courage at a time when many feel shame and darkness about our current political predicament.

And what do we accomplish by doing this? Well, we:

1. Repeat the Democratic mistakes of the past; cavalierly ignoring people’s frustrations to your own peril;

2. Waste time fighting the effect rather than the cause;

3. And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, we accomplish being lead solely by the nagging fear that our chosen candidate may not have a vision strong enough, or talent undeniable enough to eclipse the mere IDEA of an Oprah run.

Wouldn’t that be sad if a leader, hand-picked my party elites that was so un-compelling that they couldn’t rally a nation?

😏

Save your condescension and vitriol for the letters you send your chosen representative to ask them to step up to the plate and give us the type of national scale moral leadership and messaging we, the greater populace, has been thirsting for.

Consider this critics: If you have seen a handful of people who are arguably smart, or at least, who are arguably not stupid who could see themselves theoretically throwing their support behind her, could you consider that maybe there is something you may have not considered? Or even worse, that you’ve unintentionally projected how you wish to feel about a candidate on to someone else…

But I’m getting ahead of myself, like I mentioned before, as with a cough, you could, in theory, suppress her candidacy. You could throw cold water on it on your Facebook page. But you know what the reality is? That box of Sudafed may kill one cough. But a thousand more will take its place — with potentially the next one even less desirable than the last.

But you’ll still have a cold!

Oprah is a symptom of where we find ourselves, and unless you have a plan to indict/retool the system as a whole, do not continue to call it what it is not. Dems it is not where our fight really is.

Fact 👀:

There WILL be celebrities who will be entering into the field of candidates for both the Democratic and Republican nominee in the 2020 election. Sit in it. Get used it it. Throw a party for that fact. Because if we overlook the world as it is for the IDEA of the world as we want it AGAIN, we will lose.

(If we didn’t sufficiently mourn that the day that Donald Trump was elected

😥 we should have. But that door is now open.)

We can no more change these facts as we can un-ring a bell, or call dye back from the sea.

It is the current barrel that we now face — and to continue to see Trump as an aberration is not to have learned our lesson!!!!!!!

Democrats: Most of our political dysfunction is owed to the fact that we think people are thirsting for answers to policy when most of the issues that we face on a daily basis no longer our political issues but cultural issues!!!!

READ THAT AGAIN.

That curiously simple and often under explored fact answers the reason of why you are having to reckon with the candidacy of people like Trump or Oprah. Know this. Internalize this. Commit it to memory. Tattoo it on your four head: either change your strategy or again get swept out in 2020.

These are unprecedented times, maybe scary times even, but they are our times.

And rather than having Democrats try to turn back the hands of time and unmake people candidates. I’d rather we spent the amazing brain trust we have between us in positioning ourselves to be competitive in this new reality.

Lincoln once said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.“

And I think that’s where we find ourselves. There was a time in our quiet past where the only barrier to entry to becoming president was a jurist doctorate, white skin, name ID and a multimillion dollar warchest — but that time is over, Donald Trump has forever disrupted that reality. He has — like Justice Jackson said set a precedent — “that will lay about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of anybody that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.“

This has already happened, and so we either can use this weapon to our benefit, or lay down and get blown away by it.

And unfortunately, this tendency of us dems, not to see a bullet coming — to see ourselves as too haughty to prepare for it — has handicapped us to the point of incompetence.

We are out here racking our brains to find yet another reason to show our counterparts why she does not have the necessary experience… When all we had from Obama in 2006 in 2004 was a good man who could sell a good dream, we believed in. Full stop.

Like on Feb 15th in 2008, when Obama interviewed by 60 minutes he wasn’t asked and didn’t say the following.

Steve Croft:
“When you sit down and you look at your resume, there’s no executive experience, and in fact, correct me if I’m wrong, the only thing that you’ve actually run was the Harvard Law Review.”

Obama: “Well, I’ve run my Senate office, and I’ve run this campaign.”

He was an amazing president, but the pre-requisite for being a game changing amazing president isn’t having served in public office before, it is being a person of exceedingly good character, with a vision large enough and concrete enough that people will drop what they’re doing to follow in good faith. Full stop.

The founders of this nation were not career politicians. The founders of this nation did not have degrees in international politics, Masters of public policy, did not attend Ivy League schools, had no executive experience — they were farmers.

They were citizen statesman.

They were the very embodiment of the idea that anyone, from any walk of life could put their hat in the ring to become president of the United States.

And then unless we didn’t mean it — unless we’ve changed. Take it on the chin, and call your candidate to get in the arena and get some dirt on their uniform. Because people are waiting.

There is a vacuum of leadership, and the ‘stars’ of our party are just waiting it out until they get is closest to midterms as possible before they announce. Or before they call any press conference on any one of a number of landmark issues that have been hampering people spirits in the past year.

That abdication of moral leadership is something that I don’t respect. Times of crisis call out for a leader, where are they? Where is their rallying cry? Where is there coherent vision? Where is there compelling connection to the national story that reaches out to us and pulls us up by the scruff of our collars to listen to it.

To Harris, Castro, Warren, Gillibrand, Delaney, and Booker, don’t be so precious waiting for your moment — you might just lose anyways if you don’t get out there and run.

Don’t ask Oprah to turn down. Ask your candidate to turn up.