The Oprah Book Club is a no-brainer fatted calf for any self-respecting social satirist.

What could be riper for potshots than ABC's audience of pasty Midwesternettes squirming eagerly for their next directive from the beautiful black Buddhess herself? Staggering book sales follow the placing of the Winfrey laurel upon some critically acclaimed, but commercially undervalued, scribe; in the publishing industry, it's the equivalent of winning the lottery. We have even become so accustomed to Oprah's influence over her audience that there is a presumption she has a cultural Midas touch. This summer, she and Hearst Publications inked a deal to create an eponymous magazine with a press run of close to a million, hitting the stands in spring. This fall, she announced her partnership with Oxygen, the latest woman-centered über-network. With the exception of Beloved's box-office swan dive, one would think that Oprah could do no wrong by virtue of the fact that she never is. This conclusion, however, is a dangerous shortcut to thinking that obfuscates a larger mass psychological phenomenon: Oprah is never wrong because we don't want her to be.

Examine the scenario of the Oprah Book Club. The audience is arranged in a semicircle around the central figure of a bosomy older woman, with a large screen on the wall directly behind her, projecting audio-visual aids with her presentation. The color scheme is muted, and the music is soothing and cheerful. Literary discussions are restricted to "I feel" statements. The nostalgic chord the scene strikes is potent. She's not Oprah after all! She's Mrs. Babcock, your second-grade teacher! Suddenly, you're 7 years old again, and it's time for Special Assigned Reading-right after gym, just before snacks. You've just finished Paddington Bear, and the class is about to start Madeline. A warm, maternal smile beams upon the grade-school intelligentsia. Mrs. Babcock's room and Oprah's book club share the sentiment typical of a classroom: a nurturing, benevolent dictatorship of mother by proxy.

Oprah, as well as gardening/IPO/wicker supergenius Martha Stewart, fulfills the cultural needs of the American public, needs that originate from the unusually Victorian role-play still present in the American domestic sphere. Within our cultural and political spheres, we strive to replicate this role-play: Mother as the source of infallible lifestyle-related directives; Father as the source of a discipline that we can trust, but with which we can reasonably disagree and eventually outgrow. We seek the comfort in Mommy always being right and Daddy "just not understanding." Out of these proclivities come both the maternal, lifestyle dictators of culture and the paternal, democratic figures of politics.

These roles, reinforced by people like Oprah Winfrey, have tangible incarnations in our daily lives - most noticably, I believe, in the current race for candidacy in the upcoming presidential election. Recently, America lost its last prospect for a female presidential candidate when Liddy Dole extracted her hat from the Election 2000 ring. The New York Daily News and the New York Post, those tabloid mouthpieces of Manhattanite sensibility, trumpet an unequivocal Bronx cheer at Hillary Clinton's (now official) bid for the Senate. That these events are indicative of a persistent American misogyny is, again, as convenient as the presumption of Oprah's infallibility. This comparison - "women in politics" is basically a joke while "women as powerful cultural forces" is assumed and accepted - points to the real existence of misogyny within the American power elite.

In fact, you could say that paternalism is driving Election 2000. A recent New York Times article by Michiko Kakutani astutely observes that all five presidential contenders are published authors. It is no surprise that the linchpin in all five men's memoirs is the desire to either escape or fulfill the legacies of their literal or symbolic fathers: Bush Jr. and Bush Sr., Forbes Jr. and Forbes Sr., Gore and Clinton, Bradley and the institutional paternalism of Princeton and the Knicks, and finally, McCain and the entirety of his best-selling The Faith of My Fathers. Not one of these men has emerged as being more dogmatic than another-it is their personalities, as their memoirs indicate, rather than their politics, that distinguish them (with the possible exception of Forbes' quixotic quest of a flat tax-but no one is going to elect a man who has the thousand-yard stare of a bus-stop pervert anyway). Despite the semblance of partisanship that still exists in American politics, Election 2000 has already become survival of the most moderate. All of its candidates have correctly surmised that the race will be won by he who can inspire the most trust rather than the most political agreement. Such is Clinton's ultimate paternal legacy of Monicagate.

This is not to say that a man cannot hold a role of cultural power. The crux of the matter is one of cultural prescription, wherein a personality sells a product, or cultural suggestion, wherein a product sells a personality. This is the difference between the celebrity of Richard Simmons and Marilyn Manson vs. the celebrity of Calvin Klein and Stephen King. Put a man in a culturally prescriptive role and he will come across as comical, faddish, and hysterical. Put a man in a culturally suggestive role and he may become an American institution.

Today it seems one's personal cultural preferences are more of a character litmus than one's politics: Americans have a greater horror of reading the wrong book than of choosing the wrong presidential candidate. Taste in art expresses one's class affiliations more so than one's agreement with passing policy. Both culture and politics are mutable, but one's cultural preferences are perceived as voluntary expressions of identity (why else would certain films and novels be "guilty pleasures?"), whereas one's politics derive from a more murky, personal ether. To protect us against the indictments of an "incorrect" cultural selection, we seek the ironclad lifestyle directives of Oprah and Martha. To reassure our personal political affiliations, we rely on the affable, fatherly charms of Bill Bradley and John McCain. Thus we strive for the realizations of a typical adult American: the relief of Daddy being likable, and Mommy being right.

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