Can Oprah Help Get Obama into the White House?

By Felix Gilette and Leon Neyfakh, New York Observer. Posted August 18, 2007.

If you picked it up with a pair of tweezers and plopped it down in a sterile laboratory environment, the conversation which took place between Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama on Oct. 18, 2006, probably wouldn't look so good under a microscope.

Here were two people with impeccably manicured public images bemoaning the calculated spin of politics. Two professionally driven people paying homage to life outside of work. If you tested the exchange for traces of organic life, the results would probably come back negative.

But thanks to the fertile emotional agar of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the interview was well received. In the end, the proven convention-hall orator walked away with some much-needed small-room credibility. At one point, Ms. Winfrey asked the senator from Illinois about his presidential ambitions. "So if you were ever to run ... would you announce on this show?"

"I don't think I could say no to you," replied Mr. Obama. And a few seconds later: "Oprah, you're my girl."

Ms. Winfrey did not get to break the big news -- but she is definitely Obama's girl, supporting the Illinois senator's presidential bid in her typically big, multiplatform way. And now, the the "My Girl" interchange is campaign-famous.

In what the Internet universe refers to as "meatspace," there's the big Sept. 8 fund-raiser for Mr. Obama -- to be held at her $64 million estate in Montecito, Calif. (Tara II, it's called.)

That's going well: It was apparently so in demand among Democrats that tickets were restricted to the 250 members of Mr. Obama's national finance committee. Each got seven of the coveted $2,300 tickets to sell to friends who want to give the primary-season limit to Mr. Obama -- or who just want to get a look at the talk-show queen's 23,000-square-foot Georgian style mansion, or stroll the 42 acres of ponds, orchards and rustic outbuildings.

But the millions of dollars the event will raise for Mr. Obama is not the most interesting thing Ms. Winfrey has to offer his campaign.

"My money isn't going to make any difference," Ms. Winfrey told Larry King in May. "My value to him, my support of him is probably worth more than any check that I could write."

And, though she told her interviewer that no, she wouldn't be running for office herself, she did admit that with this campaign she was expanding her role in politics.

So, can Ms. Winfrey expand her kingmaking into politics?

"I think this is a celebrity endorsement," said Martin Kaplan, a research professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and erstwhile White House speechwriter.

Of course she can make people like him. But can she get people to vote for him?

"Most research," Mr. Kaplan said, "says, 'No.'"

But that's just the kind of research many political insiders are eager to see put to the test.

After all, she has gone where no other celebrity has gone. She has, in one category after another -- from the publishing industry to the magazine industry to the charity circuit to Broadway to Hollywood -- made herself a kingmaker with her (literally) trademarked brand of direct marketing.

It's something the Obama campaign is aware of.

"I think Oprah is one of those people that transcends race and class," said Robert Gibbs, the communications director for the Obama campaign, when this reporter caught up with him over the weekend in Chicago. "It's people from all walks of life who see some segment of themselves in her."

"It's one of those endorsements that speaks to so many people," he added. "I think she has proved her marketing ability beyond almost any other person that is in public life to some degree, and obviously we're hopeful that just a little bit of that rubs off on us."

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