World Views | Oprah is the symbol America needs right now

Forget Oprah Winfrey for president. We don’t need another political newbie in the Oval Office. But the response to her eloquent Golden Globes speech demonstrates a craving, and not just on the left, for skills she’s already mastered.

She knows how to represent the country in a unifying and inspirational way. Note the numerous shoutouts to men, from Sidney Poitier to TV executive Dennis Swanson to “some pretty phenomenal men,” in a speech that could easily have become male-bashing.

She’d make a terrific head of state. And we need one.

Donald Trump’s presidency has highlighted the value of constitutional checks and balances, but it has also revealed a great flaw in the U.S. system. By uniting the executive and ceremonial roles in a single office, the presidency requires someone who can both win a partisan campaign and represent all Americans. It is the ceremonial role that is invoked in the phrase “respect for the office,” as distinct from its occupant.

The traditional distinction is between “head of government,” the prime minister in a parliamentary system, and “head of state,” the ceremonial role filled by a constitutional monarch or an office like the Israeli president.

That model doesn’t apply to the U.S. With its independent legislative and executive branches, however, the U.S. system doesn’t really have a head of government. And treating the head of one branch of government as the embodiment of the American nation and its constitutional system – the head of state – has always been problematic. Why not the speaker of the House or the chief justice of the Supreme Court? The branches are supposed to be coequal.

Now we have a chief executive whose primary interest in the office seems to be enjoying the public trappings that declare him top dog. Yet he is remarkably clumsy at playing head of state. He even turned a ceremony honoring the Navajo code talkers of World War II into an utterly inappropriate, racist and partisan word-association ramble calling Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”

A president who avoids the Kennedy Center Honors, lest he attract protesters, and repels basketball champions invited to the White House is failing as head of state. Having established his base by challenging his predecessor’s native birth, Trump made it unusually difficult for opponents to separate respect for the office with respect for the man who holds it. The result is that the U.S. effectively no longer has a head of state.

We can thank Trump for reminding us both that the president – any president – isn’t the best representative of the nation as a whole. We don’t need another politically inexperienced celebrity as chief executive. But we could use a living symbol.

And if Oprah seriously wants to be president, she should first take a crack at governor of California. Virginia Postrel, Bloomberg