"Seriously, Who Would Want That Job?"

Never to be President Oprah, shot by that genius, Ruven Afanador.

Last Dispatch from Kalorama Heights:

We have reached the part of the disaster movie where somebody screams We’re all gonna die! (spoiler alert: that person always dies). This is a clinch moment for all sorts of reasons, but if you’ve paid attention to American politics over the past half-century, you know panic and dread are the official backup singers of the Democratic Party. Whenever the Dems face a potential presidential debacle, a friend with deep ties to that fractious outfit rings up and says: “Well, what About Oprah?”

That just happened. I think of it as my Dems-in-Disarray alarm clock—the point where people reach for an emergency cord to yank. Back in jittery 2019, I actually had a conversation with Oprah Winfrey about running for president. Among other things, she said: “Seriously, who would want that job? You’d have to be crazy.”

For a celebrity, Oprah has a firm grip on reality.

Oprah’s not in the mix this time (pundits are serving Kamala with a side of governors on the lido deck). But she’s right about the presidency. If you don’t start out a little nuts, the job will make you so. All presidents are insulated from critique, dislike the press, and lean on a clutch of loyalists. They rarely trust their vice presidents and tend to undermine them. An oval cocoon makes them dotty and thin-skinned about their achievements. It’s hard to give the world’s most powerful human crappy news, but to be a good president is to resist the embalming process.

And that’s when things are going well.

At the moment, things are not so awesome. They have been made diabolical by information systems that seal presidents and the rest of us into echo chambers.