Oprah Winfrey Has Saved Us All Again By Not Running for President

In a display of excellent judgement on her part, Oprah Winfrey told 60 Minutes she isn’t going to run for president. I’m honestly relieved, because when you’re mega-rich, have a solid fan base and people start telling you that you could be president, it’s the sort of thing that can get inside your head, even if you’d be completely unqualified for the position and end up making North Korea look good by comparison.

Variety reported that Winfrey said in the interview, scheduled to run tomorrow, that she was “humbled by the fact that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but it’s just not in my spirit. It’s not in my DNA.”

Thank god for that. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Oprah is, on the whole, a wonderful person. She’s promoted a few snake-oil salesmen in moves that would call her judgement into question were she to run for office, but as a television host and an interviewer, there’s almost no one better. Oprah is smart, capable and empathetic, but I don’t think anyone who treats Doctor Oz like a serious person is qualified to be president.

Now, I consider myself pretty far to the left on the political spectrum. I supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election, and I hope he runs and wins in 2020. So keep that in mind when I say that the Democratic Party is run by morons and Oprah not running is probably saving them from themselves. The low-level buzz about Oprah for president made me worried that the Democrats would actually get behind the frankly insane idea that being rich and having a TV show somehow qualifies you to be President of the United States. Anyone who reads the news can clearly see that isn’t the case.

But since their humiliating loss in 2016, many prominent Democratic surrogates have refused to admit that Clinton campaign made any mistakes or that left-wing populism would win support from voters. They’ve made vague insinuations that Russia somehow hacked thousands of voting machines that do not have the ability to connect to the internet, called the left-wing of the party sexist and racist, and doubled down on the policies and strategies that lost to Donald Trump. So it would not have surprised me in the slightest if the neoliberal centrists of the Democratic party had tried to elevate Oprah to a presidential run.

Thankfully, Oprah herself is smarter than most Democratic pundits and has taken herself out of consideration. It’s for the best. Oprah can do a lot of good for a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean she’d be a good president.