The Press is breathless about Oprah expanding her considerable influence to the political process with her advocacy of the Obama For President Campaign. Can Oprah's undeniable power in single handedly annointing Best Selling authors be translated to tghe highest office in the land? Certainly, any promising author best supplicate him or herself to the House of Winfrey. This is not a facetious comment, rather, a statement of fact.
Personally, I am not concerned about the potential of her super powers in creating best sellers being transformed into the power to anoint a POTUS. Why, you ask? Basically, Oprah has "a rabid fan base of 8.5 million, mostly women", according to some magazine article I read that was breathlessly positing on Oprah the Kingmaker. In any case, Best Selling Authors sell 30,000 to maybe 100,000 books, except for the decidedly non Oprah Book Clubbish Publishing Mammoths of Harry Potter, Stephen King, John Gresham, and Dan Brown. Oprah, then, is mobilizing some 4/10 of 1% to a maximum of 1.1% of her rabid fan base to make a $20 purchase. Wonderful, to be sure, for an up and coming author who will stand to make, oh, $30-$100k on this publicity, but hardly indicative of the power to king or queen make.
On the other hand, I am not sure I wouldn't mind seeing Oprah flex some heretofor unknown awesome power to annoint Presidents. The money saved, not to mention the National Embarrasment of watching grown men and women speak from every part of their mouths trying to be friends with everything between snake-shaking fundamentalists and the Mexican Mafia while forgetting about the normal folk may be worth the end of Democratic Elections for President.
This years crop is pathetic, at best. Those that create the most excitement are marginalized as being "unelectable" by those that have no message. The rest of the world looks on incredulously as they see who we promote as the "Best Americans". Reducing politics to men and women asking for Oprah's indulgence doesn't look so bad in comparison. If we want to maintain two party rule, we could have Oprah and Chuck Norris, attributed with the recent "Huckaboom" (don't you just love it?), debate each other on TV. Or better yet, the two could cage fight it out with Bowie Knives.
At least it would be entertaining in a less sickening way, and we wouldn't watch billions of dollars being flushed down the coffers of network television as paid advertising for one side or another. Unless we decide to make the Knife Fight pay per view.
Elections, you see, are big fat business for the press. The more controversial a campaign, the more money every side will spend to get it's message across, thus driving the press to distort the messages even more , thus forcing even more ad spending to straghten the message, ad nauseam in a vicious circle of advertsing hell that makes all of us think that the people running things are massive corrupt fools, thus undermining the legitimacy of Government. Not that they Aren't... What a system!
Well said! What do you think about publicly funded elections to end the big business that campaigns have become?
Posted by: Steve M. | December 10, 2007 at 01:58 PM