December 07, 2007
WH '08: We Can Haz Votes?
Iowa, Oprah. Oprah, Iowa.
Sure, she can move Tolstoy, but can she move middle-aged white women to the Jan. 3 caucuses? We'll get our first clues this weekend when Oprah Winfrey, probably the most famous woman in America, joins Democratic candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail.
The Oprah and Obama show, as it's already being dubbed, hits Iowa tomorrow and South Carolina and New Hampshire on Sunday. Tickets for the Columbia, S.C., rally went so fast that it was moved from an 18,000-seat venue to an 80,000-plus capacity football stadium.
The political press already gets excited when celebs team up with politicians because, well, they're celebs. The Oprah-Obama moment, however, takes us into completely untested and somewhat bizarre waters. Oprah is probably the most famous and beloved woman in America. "Beloved" may actually be a little weak. If you are not already acquainted with her daytime talk show, the feverish, high-decibel fervor her alarmingly ecstatic audience frequently displays might be a little frightening to watch. So much so that this "SNL" parody doesn't seem that far off the mark.
The premise that women in early primary states will run screaming at the top of their lungs toward the Obama camp once they get a glimpse of him with Oprah, then, becomes not a little offensive. Maybe, dare we say, a lot offensive.
We know from past experience that celebrities not only don't have a measurable effect in driving votes, but they are sometimes resented for the apparent assumption that anyone thinks they might. Oprah's so popular that the latter probably won't be the case -- i.e., don't expect a backlash -- but some prognosticators are wondering if all the hype is overblown. As we well know, early primary state voters take their role in the electoral process very seriously, and short of giving a brand new Pontiac to every rally attendee it's hard to see how Oprah really does convert those supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Our Obama campaign embed, Aswini Anburajan, crunched the numbers and found the following: 56,000 households in Iowa's four main media markets watch Oprah every day. That's out of the state's nearly 3 million residents, 150,000 of whom participated in the 2004 caucuses.
South Carolina is a potentially different story. In Iowa, Obama is attempting to use Oprah's influence among her mostly white, older women viewers to entice that state's mostly white, older women caucus-goers. The battle in South Carolina is for the black vote, where to the Obama camp's frustration he remains about tied with Clinton for that bloc and far behind among whites, giving her a solid lead overall.
Obama's weakness in that state is being attributed to three factors: reluctance to focus heavily on race; familiarity with Clinton and her husband, President Clinton; and an assumption that Clinton is more likely to beat a Republican in the general. Oprah may not be able to sway primary voters on the third, but she can certainly have an effect on the first two.
The familiarity point is a no-brainer -- South Carolinians will be inundated with sound and images of the Oprah-Obama rally. The race point is a little more complicated.
Activists like Jesse Jackson have complained about Obama's refusal to weigh in on their issues more vocally, but it is almost certainly the case that Obama wouldn't have the support among non-blacks that he has if he were to take up racially divisive rallying cries. When it comes to race, Obama's campaign has mainly stressed unity and transcendence.
What better way to drive that point home than with Oprah at his side. The sight of Oprah alongside Obama at this rally will be a tremendous moment for black America. That the two have overcome all those old barriers to achieve so much might actually obviate any need for Obama to focus more on black issues -- the pictures would say it all. There's a lot of cold general-election strategizing going on in primary voters' heads, as we've noted before. Might they be due for a little inspiration?
Posted at 6:23 PM
Posted to:
Barack Obama, Campaigns, Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Race, WH 2008
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