Senator Winfrey?

It what can only be called a piece of speculative writing, an Associated Press reporter recently opined that maybe Oprah Winfrey would be the perfect placeholder senator for California if and/or when Dianne Feinstein finally realizes who and where she is, becomes infuriated with the vicious elder abuse she has been put through in the past year or so, channels her inner Cartman and says “Screw you guys – I’m going home!”

Or something else happens that leaves her seat vacant.

Feinstein has not been mentally or physically up to the task of being a senator for quite some time, a fact many have commented upon except for Joe Biden.  I wonder why…

Very little of the commentary has been in the “wow, she really needs some care and even if she really wants to stay it’s pretty cruel to let her and it would be best for her emotional and physical health if she stepped back.”

Sadly, most of the calls for her to step aside have been based in heartless gutter numbers politics – “she’s no longer woke enough, she’s holding up votes, she needs to go so we can more easily ram our agenda through and that old bat RBG screwed us and we can’t let that happen again so she needs to be tossed on the ice floe NOW.”

(Note – I’ve met DiFi a few times and always found her personally engaged in the work she was doing.  While I didn’t agree with her that often, she did what she did intellectually honestly.  And, unlike that other senator named Boxer, Feinstein actually cared about what was happening in California and made sure her staff did as well. Finally, as a former municipal person herself she understood the difficulties cities of all sizes faced and made sure to stay on top of those seemingly small issues…at least when I was in office, which was a bit ago.)

So the question of Feinstein’s replacement has been bubbling up more since her catastrophic return to DC and at least one person thinks Oprah would make a keen fit.

Gavin has already promised that he will appoint a black woman if Feinstein leaves.  Putting aside the foulness of eliminating swaths of qualified people for any job on a race-based whim – Kamala’s working out real well for Joe, isn’t she? And Biden’s Supreme Court appointment promise kept comes to mind, there is the complication of the 2024 election coming up.  

If Newsom tapped current congresswoman and black woman and black candidate Barbara Lee to replace Feinstein, she would then have a huge advantage in the 2024 race, infuriating candidates Rep. Adam Schiff (Oh, I wish I could accidentally misspell that) and the already always comically infuriated Rep. Katie Porter (and maybe some other people.)

So that leaves Gavin with only about 800,000 (female, black, at least 30 years old) or so Californians to choose from. And Oprah is one of them.

And she may be the richest, most powerful, and most well-known of them all. Getting her to promise not to run in 2024 – which would be a condition for any replacement it seems – might be surprisingly easy as it would be one of the most amazing, least accountable 18 month ego-trips imaginable.

She may even fit in to the august chamber rather nicely, too.  She has smoked crack, fawned over Harry and Meghan, made people pay unexpected taxes (when she gave the cars away she didn’t give the audience money to cover the taxes,), exploited minority populations, and spouted such squishy culture nonsense over the years that she, in fact, may already be tailor made to be a senator.

There is another option, but that would involve Gavin breaking a promise so that won’t happen…I kid.

Nancy Pelosi is old and no longer Speaker of the House and could maybe – just maybe – be convinced to spend a little time on the other side of the capitol to end her DC career (admittedly, she may run for re-election to her 147th term representing San Francisco so there is that issue.)

How about this?

Feinstein resigns, Gavin taps Nancy pointing out she knelt wearing Kente cloth after George Floyd died, so she’s black enough for progressive political purposes, Scott Weiner takes Pelosi’s seat in Congress, and Pelosi spends her whole time in the Senate making sure her boy toy Schiff gets elected.

Though admittedly an awful end-of-days scenario, it cannot be ruled out considering the ethics of the people involved.  It would be a different way to help him, but at least Pelosi could stop building that robot clone of Feinstein to keep her in office to help Schiff in 2024.

Well, if the late lamented Jerry Springer could be mayor of Cincinnati, I guess Oprah would have to be at least a senator.

And then she would have real world experience, just in case…

Michelle/Oprah 2024, anyone?