It was, if you stopped to think about it, a rather incredible event. A woman born in Mississippi to a poor, unmarried mother who rose to huge fame and fortune, standing on stage beside a fellow African-American who was largely unknown a year ago but is now vying to become the 44th president of the United States.
Barack Obama acknowledged as much when he addressed his friend and now active supporter Oprah Winfrey on Saturday night. ”Me being here is so unlikely,” he said in front of 10 000 people in a sports hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second-largest town. ”Just like Oprah being where she is, is so unlikely. The odds are so small.”
He paused a beat to let the thought sink in, then invoked Martin Luther King: ”But I’m not in this race because of the odds. I’m in it because of what Dr King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’.”
The fierce urgency of now swept this weekend through three states whose early primary elections a few weeks away could prove crucial in determining who takes the keys to the White House in January 2009. Ten thousand turned up to hear Winfrey lend her backing to Obama in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Sunday night; many more than that did likewise in a stadium seating 80 000 in South Carolina earlier in the day in the largest rally of the elections so far; and on Saturday 18 000 assembled in Iowa’s capital, Des Moines, in addition to the crowd that battled through heavy snow to be in Cedar Rapids.
The task was clear: could the queen of daytime talk TV use her celebrity power that brings 46-million viewers to her show each week to overcome the unlikeliness of Obama’s candidacy?
It was an unfamiliar challenge for her. She told the crowd that addressing a political rally felt like ”stepping out of the box” for her. ”I’ve never taken this kind of risk before, nor felt compelled to stand up and speak out.”
In riposte to the legion of commentators who have asked whether she could sell Obama in the same way she has sold millions of books and given away thousands of TV gifts, she quipped: ”I have no cars, no refrigerators, not gonna sing. I’m just here because I believe in this country.”
At times she was strangely muted, her head down reading from notes at a podium. Where was the Oprah swagger, the march into the audience to quiz someone about their most intimate secrets? Instead, she gave a lecture on the trouble with education, healthcare and poverty; and on politicians: ”You don’t see a lot of politicians on my show. I don’t like to mess with politicians, ’cause I only got an hour.”
Obama was her exception: ”It’s different with Barack Obama — you get to witness a really rare thing, a politician who has an ear for eloquence and a tongue dipped in unvarnished truth.”
With Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton by three points in Iowa — well within the margin of error — and trailing by equal measure in New Hampshire, he still faces a daunting task against the relentless machine politics of the Clinton campaign. It would take more than Winfrey to win.
But then, as she came to introduce Obama on to the Cedar Rapids stage, her role became clear. She was not there as fairy godmother, waving her magic wand to usher him into the White House. She was there as decoy — a lure to draw thousands of Iowans, many of them as yet undecided about which way to vote on January 3, into the auditorium, so that Obama could then knock them dead. Which is what he did.
”How’s it going, Cedar Rapids?” he began, politician as rock star. ”There’s this woman with a funny name,” he said, turning to Winfrey. ”How does it feel to have a funny name?
Despite the many hurdles standing in his way — from his race as the son of a black Kenyan to his inexperience as a junior senator of less than three years’ standing — Obama should not be underestimated. He had the crowd laughing and screaming and, at the end, swearing allegiance.
”We are in a defining moment in our history,” he said, and thousands fell silent. ”Our nation’s at war, the planet is in peril, the dream that so many generations fought for feels that it is slowly slipping away.”
Two words were never mentioned: Clinton and Hillary. But his great rival was the elephant in the hall — alluded to in numerous references to conventional Washington politics, to the old corridors of power, to the need for clarity in foreign policy. ”When I am president, you won’t be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq because I did not.”
By the finale the audience was, in the words of the subsequent song, ”signed, sealed and delivered”. ”If you stand with me,” Obama boomed out, ”we will not only change America; we will change the world. God bless you, Cedar Rapids!”
And with that he turned round to hug a beaming Winfrey, who for once in her life had been thoroughly out-Oprahed.
In the meantime, while the two Os were strutting their stuff in Cedar Rapids, three generations of Hillary Clinton’s family were on display elsewhere in Iowa in a barely disguised, and largely unsuccessful, attempt to steal some of the thunder.
Clinton claimed it was purely coincidental that her mother, 88-year-old Dorothy Rodham, had been rolled out alongside her daughter Chelsea (27). The three appeared together on Saturday in four Iowan towns.
”I wanted to bring a buddy with me so I brought my mother,” said Clinton in Des Moines. Chelsea’s first appearance on the campaign trail was marked by no set speeches, though she did glad-hand hundreds of potential voters. — Guardian Unlimited Â