PRACTICALLY AS SOON AS OPRAH Winfrey left the Golden Globes stage, the notion that she would campaign for—and who knows? Maybe win!— the presidency in the next election swept across social media.
When a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked her partner, Stedman Graham, about the idea, Graham said she would “absolutely do it. It’s up to the people.” The zeal for Oprah 2020 is still catching, and understandably so: not only is Winfrey hugely popular, but it would mark a historic occasion for women, particularly women of color, who remain underrepresented in positions of power. (That Winfrey briefly, glancingly denied interest in running in a backstage interview mattered little. How many times did Hillary Clinton deny that a 2016 run was in the cards?)
Winfrey has been floated for political office before, and her endorsement of Barack Obama was a pivotal 2008 campaign moment as well as a test bubble of whether the Oprah brand worked at the ballot box. She’s certainly media-savvy enough to know how her speech would land. But the volume and the passion of the response was a genuine surprise. After all, Winfrey had been speaking in a stirring way on public stages for decades without such an outpouring of support for America’s projected ambitions.
This story is from the January 22,2018 edition of Time.
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This story is from the January 22,2018 edition of Time.
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