How Oprah Could Unify Washington

A few years back, Oprah reported on a program on Trauma Informed Care on 60 Minutes.

In the 60 Minutes Overtime segment, Oprah shared how that story was one of the most life changing in her amazing career.

When she was asked what made it so, she replied that the highly successful program never reacted to children’s overt behavior with judgment or even advice. Instead, they always asked these children who were acting out and acting up, “What happened to you that caused you to do what you did?” In other words, they assumed innocence inside these children and also assumed that if they were misbehaving, that something had happened to cause them to act that way.

That 60 Minutes story was so life changing for Oprah that she went on to write a recent best selling book with Bruce Perry, M.D., PhD entitled, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing.

My fantasy about how Oprah could unify Washington and help end gridlock in Washington would be for her to do a televised program in which she would interview together, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, arguably the most non-President influential voices in their parties.

In that interview she would ask each of them the following questions:

1. On the topics of the economy, healthcare, Covid-19, foreign policy, race relations, law enforcement, education, homelessness, mental health (add any other pressing issues) what are you and your party’s positions that you feel most strongly about?

2. How did you and your party come to those positions and why?

3. What alternatives did you consider and rule out and why?

4. What is the makeup of the entire constituencies that you each represent and who voted you into office?

5. If you were to create an avatar that would be representative of those constituencies, what would be most important to that avatar regarding each of those issues and what is your evidence for that?

6. Tell us how your current position on those issues is in the best interest of your entire constituency.

Then if Oprah served as an avatar of all of America, one would hope that her point of view towards Pelosi and McConnell, would be that the less either of them had to hide, the less they would have to fear in answering these questions.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Might such an interview with Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell in the “sunlight” of a public live broadcast asking the above questions offer a chance to disinfect the gridlock that is now infecting Washington and keeping progress at a stalemate?

At the very least it could serve as a strong nudge to remind them that they are serving their constituencies, and the American people first, and their political party second.

It couldn’t hurt.