Good Politics Start with Oprah

by Bryan Cockfield

With a regular daily attendance of at least 15 million people, the Church of O is competitive with the Southern Baptist Convention as the second largest denomination in the United States. The strength in numbers of people who belong to the Church of O has turned Oprah into a significant political, religious, and cultural idol.

Obviously, nothing Oprah has ever said has ever been wrong. Much like the Bible has no contradictions in it and is the infallible and the complete Word of God, Oprah is the complete and inerrant Word of the American People.

Let’s put aside the James Frey incident where Oprah praised his book at one moment, then Frey’s book was exposed as being fiction instead of a memoir, and Oprah stood by the book on principle until she decided that Frey did something bad by publishing a book that made her and her book club look foolish. (We should put this one example aside to keep up with the extended Bible metaphor: Jeremiah 10:2-8 says Christians should not cut down and decorate trees. So much for Christmas.)

We should also put aside the $40 million school Oprah built in Africa instead of in inner-city United States. (We should put this aside because our own government thinks the freedoms of people in Iraq are more important than our own. See: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/ for the President’s new budget.)

But we absolutely cannot dismiss her unwavering support of Barack Obama for President. Oprah is such an influential character in American Politics now that she would recognize the consequences of essentially nominating a Democratic candidate with virtually no political experience, no legitimate or novel policies thus far in Congress, and no good personality traits except that he seems to be a profound speaker.

Public speaking, however, is a very important commodity. There were many great rulers in Europe and Asia who were powerful orators. One of whom, named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, expanded Germany’s holdings to about ten times that granted to it in the Treaty of Versailles after World War One. Another great speaker about thirty years prior took hold of the Soviet Union and was able to properly direct that country much faster than the Democrats have been able to get hold of and similarly direct the United States without the power of rhetoric.

The key difference between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Democratic Party is that the U.S.S.R. could come up with powerful speakers to whip its people into a frenzy. Another important key difference is that the rulers in Germany and the U.S.S.R. took advantage of economic and social turmoil in their respective countries at the time.

But isn’t this essentially what we have in the United States now? There are faith-based initiatives, one veto by the president against scientific inquiry, a war that should be generating money but somehow cannot improve the economy like it should, and political parties taking advantage of unimportant and irrelevant social issues to blind its people from vital (see: redistribution of wealth) economic policy. All are signs of the fact that we have lost sight of the Constitution and our roots as Americans. If it gets much worse, we can look forward to a populist-run nation like the nations in post-war Europe in the early 1900s.

This is why we must put our support behind Barack Obama. That, and because Oprah thinks it is the right thing to do. Good politics do not begin until the American people listen only to pop culture idols rather than informing themselves through quality journalism like the O’Reilly Factor or the Colbert Report. As the current administration (including the new Congress) has shown us, good politics means ignoring the facts, our history, and sometimes the Constitution.

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