WASHINGTON — Oprah or Tom Hanks for president, and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for Democratic National Committee chairman.
That’s the leadership that liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is pitching as Democrats navigate a leadership vacuum now that Hillary Clinton has lost to Donald Trump and President Barack Obama is preparing to leave the White House.
“Democrats would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks … why don’t we run beloved people?” Moore told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“We have so many of them,” he said. “The Republicans do this — they run Reagan and the Terminator and other people.” It was a reference to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as former President Ronald Reagan.
“Why don’t we run somebody that the American people love and are really drawn to, and that are smart and have good politics and all that?” Moore said.
His comments came after Oprah Winfrey told “Entertainment Tonight” that the Thursday meeting between Obama and Trump “gave me hope.”
“I just saw the two of them together. I will say this: I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House and it gave me hope,” she said in an interview aired Friday. “To hear President-elect Trump say that he had respect for President Obama, it felt that he had reached a moment where he was actually humbled by that experience.”
Moore also weighed in on the next Democratic National Committee chair, with current interim chair Donna Brazile expected to soon step down.
He said he supports Ellison, the Muslim-American congressman.
“That is the exact way to go. That is the future,” Moore said, noting the demographics shifts within the United States.
