by Kitty Kelley
After fifteen years on the air Oprah finally decided to enter the political arena. “She waited until she was rich enough so it wouldn’t affect her bottom line,” said her cousin Katharine Carr Esters. “And that was very smart of her….But then when it comes to money, no one is smarter than Oprah.”
Once she became a fixture on the Forbes “400 Richest Americans” list, Oprah became part of the nation’s political conversation by extending an invitation in 2000 to the two presidential candidates to appear on her show. “I hope to create the kind of environment and ask the questions that will allow us to break the political wall and see who each one is as a person,” she said through her publicist. The next day’s news was more about Oprah going political than it was about Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush. The headline on Salon.com read, “The Road to the White House Goes Through Oprah.”
Politically, she appeared to be a Democrat, having contributed $1,000 in 1992 to Chicago’s Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat and the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Oprah also donated $10,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1996, and $5,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 1997. Yet she claimed to have voted “for as many Democrats as I have Republicans.” However, federal election records do not show any Republican votes, only that she voted in four Democratic primaries between 1987 and 1994. She skipped voting in the 1996, 1998, and 2000 primaries, but did cast a ballot in the general elections for president.
She once boasted to a British writer, “I think I could have a great influence in politics, and I think I could get elected.” But, she added, “I think a politician would want to be me [instead]. If you really want to change people’s lives, have an hour platform every day to go into their homes.” To The Times of London she said, “Having this big voice on television is what every politician wants. They all try and get on the show and I don’t do politics on the show.”
Careful at the time not to get partisan, Oprah invited First Lady Barbara Bush to be her guest in 1989, and she later extended several invitations to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who appeared four times during her husband’s eight years in the White House. Hillary celebrated her fiftieth birthday on Oprah’s show, and Oprah asked Hillary to present her with her Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Emmys. During that ceremony, Oprah, clutching Hillary’s hand, said, “I hope you do us the privilege of running for…president of the United States.”
Oprah had considered breaking her “no politicians” rule back in 1992 by inviting Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, Sr., to be her guest, because, as she said at the time, “He’s become larger than politics,” but she backed off. Still skittish four years later, she turned down a request from Senator Robert Dole, the 1996 GOP presidential candidate, who was running against Bill Clinton.
“I was very torn [about Dole’s request to come on the show],” she told her viewers. “I went to my producers and said, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right decision.’ But in the end I decided to stay out of politics, maintaining my long-standing policy: I don’t do politicians.” At the time, her studio audience gave her a resounding ovation. “I’ve tried to stay out of politics for my entire tenure on the air,” she said that day. “Basically, it’s a no-win situation. Over the years, I have not found that interviewing politicians about the issues worked for my viewing audience. I try to bring issues that people understand through their hearts and their feelings so they can make decisions.”
Senator Dole laughed at Oprah’s explanation. “Riiight,” he jibed years later. “She doesn’t do politicians—if they run against Democrats.”
Oprah admitted she had been “asked to do everything” at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but she insisted she would not participate in any way, except for attending the parties thrown by “my friends Ethel Kennedy and John Kennedy, Jr.” Since meeting Maria Shriver in Baltimore, where they both worked for WJZ-TV, Oprah had been besotted by the Kennedys. She boosted them at every turn, contributing to Ethel Kennedy’s online charity, promoting the books of Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, attending fund-raisers for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, hosting a show titled “The Kennedy Cousins,” and inviting any and all Kennedys to appear with her throughout the years. In 2009, Victoria Kennedy gave Oprah her first interview after the death of her husband, Senator Edward Kennedy.
Although Oprah had not publicly declared herself a Democrat, her close friends—Maya Angelou, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Quincy Jones, Coretta Scott King, Toni Morrison, Andrew Young—were all Democrats committed to Clinton, and Oprah herself had been invited to the Clintons’ first white-tie state dinner in 1994, for Japan’s emperor, Akihito, and empress, Michiko. (She admitted later she had been tongue-tied in the presence of Japanese royalty. “I didn’t know what to say, and it was one of the few times.”) Oprah had attended her first White House state dinner in 1989, during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, with Stedman Graham, a conservative Republican, who would not accompany her to the Clinton White House five years later. So she took Quincy Jones.
“I met her that evening,” recalled the art dealer Christopher Addison, who, with his wife, owns the Addison/Ripley Fine Art gallery in Washington, D.C. “I did not recognize her as anybody famous then because I don’t watch daytime television, but the eighty-year-old woman who was my guest that evening told me who she was….Oprah had brought a little instamatic camera with her and asked me to take her photograph. I thought it was endearing of her to want her picture taken in the White House, almost like a tourist. Very sweet.”
Oprah had charmed them downstairs at the Bush White House by visiting the kitchen staff after the state dinner, but upstairs was another matter: the social staff found her to be overbearing and unreasonable. “She was rude and demanding, impossible to deal with,” Lea Berman, a former White House social secretary, told the Colonial Dames of America. “She insisted she be allowed to bring her own security into the president’s mansion. This is so against White House policy, but Ms. Winfrey became so adamant and shrill that we finally relented and allowed her to be accompanied by her own bodyguards.”
When Oprah issued her invitations to Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush in 2000 to appear on her show, both accepted because the presidential race was close, and each man wanted to reach her large female audience. A Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll had Bush trailing Gore by ten percentage points before the visit with Oprah; days later the same poll showed Bush in a statistical tie. News reports called it the “Oprah Bounce.” The Chicago Sun-Times editorial page saluted her for getting involved in the presidential race, and she hyped her first political foray before her season’s opening show, prompting the comedian Chris Rock to joke, “Both Gore and Bush are going to appear on Oprah, but for different reasons. Gore is trying to appeal to women voters. Bush wants to find out how in the world did this black woman get all that money.”
Oprah welcomed the vice president on September 11, 2000, and he strode onstage, greeting her with a handshake and a one-armed half-hug.
“No kiss? I was hoping for something,” she teased, referring to the exceedingly long on-camera kiss Gore had planted on his wife at the Democratic Convention. “Until today I’ve stayed away from politicians, but after fifteen years I need to try to penetrate that wall,” she told her viewers as she put Gore on notice that she was going to be more grill than gush. Despite twenty-four years in public office, he demurred, “I am a little bit more of a private person than a lot of the people in the profession.” Oprah was having none of it.
“Let’s get to that kiss,” she said. “What was that all about? What did you say to your wife? Was it scripted? Were you trying to send a message?”
“I was trying to send a message to Tipper,” Gore quipped, prompting a huge laugh from the studio audience.
“No, really,” Oprah persisted. To her credit, she interrupted whenever he lapsed into his stump speech, and tried to get something more truthful
and heartfelt.
“Well…I…It was an overwhelming surge of emotion. This was a great moment in our lives. I mean, it’s not as if I got there by myself. This has been a partnership, and she is my soul mate.”
The studio audience, mostly female, erupted in wild applause for the romantic robot, usually stiff and awkward, who seemed so in love with his wife after thirty years of marriage.
For an hour Oprah huffed and puffed and tried to blow “that wall” down, but all she got was Gore’s favorite movie (Local Hero), Gore’s favorite music (The Beatles), and Gore’s favorite cereal (Wheaties). “The woman who has persuaded hundreds of people to reveal things about themselves that might better have been kept private couldn’t get Gore out of his comfort zone,” wrote Mark Brown in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Best of all for Gore, he handled her so smoothly that Oprah never seemed to realize it.”
The following week (September 18, 2000) she welcomed Governor Bush of Texas, who arrived with coconut macaroons from Texas-based Neiman Marcus for her studio audience and greeted her with a huge kiss. The photo of Bush bussing Oprah on the cheek as she smiled gleefully made the front page of The New York Times.
“Thanks for the kiss,” she said, sitting down next to him.
“My pleasure.” He grinned.
“There were people on the street yesterday who told me that they were going to make their decision [about who to vote for] after today’s show,” she told him. The cocky governor nodded as the cocky host dug right in and asked if he was running to restore his father’s defeat by Bill Clinton. “To get revenge?”
“Not even in the teeniest, tiniest part,” Bush insisted, saying he felt “a calling” to be president. “I see America as a land of dreams, hopes, and opportunities….”
“I wanna go behind the wall now,” snapped Oprah. “Tell us about a time when you needed forgiveness.”
“Right now,” said Bush as the studio audience erupted with laughter.
“I’m looking for specifics,” Oprah said sternly.
“I know you are, but I’m running for president.” Even she had to laugh at that, and her studio audience clapped with delight. When she asked him his “favorite dream,” he raised his right hand as if to be sworn in as president, and the studio audience again rocked with laughter. Bush later got teary-eyed as he discussed his wife’s difficult pregnancy and the birth of their twin daughters. He admitted that he finally stopped drinking at the age of forty because alcohol had taken over his life.
“Ever mindful of her status as the Most Powerful Woman on the Planet, Winfrey approached the Gore and Bush interviews as if they were a sacred duty,” Joyce Millman wrote on Salon.com. “You could tell she was serious, because she interrupted Gore and Bush even more than she usually interrupts guests who have ceased to interest her….I don’t understand why Bush was so reluctant to debate his opponent; facing Al Gore for 90 minutes has got to be easier than keeping She Who Must Be Obeyed amused for an hour.”
Oprah did not endorse either candidate, but by the end of his hour, George W. Bush had hit a home run straight out of her ballpark. When Chris Rock appeared a few months later he blamed Oprah for handing the White House to the Republicans.
“You made Bush win. He came here and sat in the chair and you gave the man a win. You know you did.”
“I did not,” she said with an unconvincing laugh.
Gloria Steinem sided with the comedian. In her profile of Oprah for Time, she wrote, “Only when she leaves her authentic self behind does she lose trust, as when she aided the election of George W. Bush.”
A few weeks after Bush became president, Oprah asked for an interview with Laura Bush for O magazine, and while she and the First Lady were talking in the family quarters at the White House, the president poked his head in, saying he wanted to greet the next president of the United States. “Thank you for coming to see Laura,” he said, “and letting her show her stuff.”
Days after 9/11 shattered the country, the White House called Oprah and asked if the First Lady might appear on her show to address teachers and parents on how they could help their children through the trauma. Oprah welcomed Mrs. Bush on September 18, 2001, and they walked onstage hand in hand to try to reassure a nation that had been profoundly shaken by the horrific attacks. Reflecting the mood of the country at the time—a desire and need to come together to try to understand what had happened—Oprah presented shows on “Islam 101,” “Is War the Only Answer?” and “What Really Matters Now?”
She also did a show featuring Afghani women titled “Inside the Taliban,” which prompted another call from the White House, asking her to join Mrs. Bush, Communications Director Karen Hughes, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as part of an official U.S. delegation to visit Afghani girls returning to school after the fall of the Taliban. Oprah declined, saying she was too busy, when in fact she, like many, was too scared to travel in the wake of the terrorist attacks. She canceled a trip to launch O, The Oprah Magazine, in South Africa in April 2002, saying, “I started feeling uncomfortable about traveling. My instinct says things aren’t right in parts of the world. All parts.”
The White House leaked the story to the press on March 29, 2002, that Oprah had said no to the president and, as a consequence, the trip, designed to dampen images of global violence, had to be postponed. A controversy ensued over Oprah’s rejection after her publicist told the Chicago Tribune, “Given her responsibility to the show, she isn’t adding anything to her calendar. She was invited, but she respectfully declined.”
The headlines kicked up a media storm:
“Winfrey Won’t Tour for Bush” (New York Times)
“Envoy Oprah a No-Go: Talk Queen Declines Bush Invite to Tour Afghanistan Schools” (New York Post)
“No Oprah, No Afghan Trip” (Washington Post)
“Winfrey Declines Bush Invite to Afghan Trip; US Hoped to Show Its Help for Women” (Chicago Tribune)
“Oprah Balks; Talk Show Diva Refuses Afghanistan Invitation” (Daily News [Los Angeles])
A columnist from the Chicago Tribune wrote: “It’s great to live in a country in which a black woman finally has the power and the self-esteem to say no to the man in charge.”
That triggered a letter to the editor about what looked like a blatant snub:
I lost a lot of respect for Oprah when she declined our president’s invitation to join the U.S. delegation to tour Afghanistan’s schools. What a wonderful opportunity she had to spread good will around the world on behalf of America.
I’m sure she could have worked around her “busy schedule” as payback for all the opportunities and good fortune she has been given in our land of the free. Has she forgotten where she came from? Shame on her!
In a swivet over the negative publicity, Oprah called her friend Star Jones, then appearing on The View, to say the White House story was untrue. Jones went on the air moments later to share Oprah’s call:
[S]he had some fund-raisers that she had committed to and anybody knows when you do these things…people sell tickets expecting you to be there. So she couldn’t get out of doing [them] and she didn’t want to because she had made the commitment.
She said the White House told her they were going anyway. Then she said, “So imagine my surprise, I wake up and read in the newspaper that I’m being cavalier, I’m too busy.” She said it didn’t happen that way and it really wasn’t fair. We all know what kinds of philanthropic things that Oprah does across the country and across the world so that wasn’t fair.
She did say, “Star, I felt extremely used by the Bush administration.”
Yet within six months Oprah appeared to be helping the president in his lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. On October 9, 2002, she presented a show to “help you decide if you think we should attack Iraq.” Although she featured speakers on both sides of the issue, she gave more time and weight to those who supported going to war. At one point a member of the studio audience stood to question the existence of weapons of
mass destruction, and Oprah cut her off, saying the weapons were “just a fact,” not something up for debate. “We’re not trying to propaganda—show you propaganda—we’re just showing you what is,” Oprah said.
Immediately after the show, the antiwar website Educate-yourself.org published a letter to Oprah, saying:
A talk show host and idol to many, you usually present an open exchange of opinions. How could you allow such an unbalanced show like that to air, when the future of the entire planet is at stake?
The Swedish Broadcasting Commission also pounced, saying Oprah’s show, one of Sweden’s most popular daytime programs, betrayed bias toward a U.S. attack on Iraq. “Different views were expressed, but all longer remarks gave voice to the opinion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and should be the target of attack,” stated the commission. The Swedish government strongly opposed the invasion, saying it lacked a UN Security Council mandate.