Obama in the Media

Oprah Dispells Any Doubt: Not Me, Support Obama!

For the second time in eight months, pop icon Oprah Winfrey used fellow icon Larry King’s talk show to tell her millions of fans why she has broken her tradition of never endorsing a political candidate to declare her support for Barack’s presidential bid.

After noting that Oprah endorsed Obama once on his show, King asked the inevitable question: “Can a black man be elected president of the United States?”

“I believe he can,” she responded. “I believe a black man can and I believe he can.”

“You think he’s going to win the nomination?”

“I’m not here to say whether he will win or not. You asked me if I believed that it is possible, and yes, I believe it is,” she said.

King asked why she chose to endorse someone now and never before. “Because I know him personally and I think that what he stands for, what he has proven that he can stand for, what he has shown, was worth me going out on a limb for. I haven’t done it in the past because I didn’t know anybody well enough to be able to say, `I believe in this person,’” she explained.

King asked then if her “woman side” did not lean toward a Hillary. “I have great respect for Hillary Clinton. I’ve said this before and it’s true: Because I am for Barack does not mean I am against Hillary or anybody else. So the fact that I would support Barack Obama, I have not one negative thing to say about Hillary. I just like Barack Obama.”

Oprah told King she has not given money to Obama’s campaign, “as we are all limited in what we can give.” “My support of him is probably of worth more than any check I could write,” she said.

She, herself, will never run for office, she admonished, reminding King that she is “going to become a political activist”. “I feel that the platform that I hold, the chair in which I get to sit in every day and speak to the world is of far more value to me than any political office could be. Value in that I get to speak to people’s hearts, connect to people all over the world,” she said.

Watch for yourself!

Meanwhile, NewsMax Magazine's special report "Obama & the Oprah Factor" examines how the billionaire talk-show host and her millions of deeply devoted fans could help put the Democratic Senator from Illinois in the White House. In fact, Oprah's backing has already made Obama a top contender in a short time. The report also features the surprising results of a Zogby poll, commissioned by NewsMax, revealing Oprah's political reach and how Oprah stacks up against the power of Hillary Clinton.

NewsMax.com also reported that Barack had dinner with a Democrat veteran of the presidential campaign trail — Sen. John Kerry, adding that “it is well known that Kerry has little love for Sen. Clinton”. At the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, the pair kibbitzed for an amazing three hours as they feasted. Sen. Obama ordered hamachi salad and scallops, The Washington Post reported. Sen. Kerry opted for the octopus salad and striped bass.

The New York Sun reported that Senator Obama’s recently discovered Irish ancestors were not Catholic, but Protestant. New research has traced Obama back to his great-great-great-great grandfather Joseph Kearney, an Irish Anglican shoemaker from Moneygall who lived between 1794 and 1861. Kearney’s son emigrated to the U.S. in 1850 and is a forebear of Obama’s mother.

Right Wing Pundits’ Racial “Silliness Derby”…

In a musing about the revealing conversations about race that Sen. Obama’s presidential quest has started, Chicago Tribune editorial board member Clarence Page notes that blacks worried about whether Obama is "black enough" might be reassured by the grumblings of others who think he is too black. Referring to a recent “60 Minutes” interview where Sen. Obama addressed the question that he is not black enough, Page said the senator “quite sensibly observed” that being black or not is not something one can decide. "If you look African-American in this society, you're treated as an African-American," Barack said, "and when you're a child, in particular, that is how you begin to identify yourself."

Page eloquently dubbed the subsequent rantings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck over the issue a “silliness derby”. The first leg of the race went to Limbaugh, who apparently was rankled by Barack’s statement that he didn’t “decide” to be black. If Obama did not "decide" his race, Limbaugh declared, "well, renounce it, then. If it's not something you want to be, if you didn't decide it, renounce it, become white!" But Beck moved up fast in the race, Page writes, by declaring Obama to be "colorless." "As a white guy," Beck said, "... you don't notice that he is black. So he might as well be white, you know what I mean?" Beck added that he'll probably be called a "racist" by some bloggers for saying that. Page then writes: “He hopes. It might help his ratings.” Indeed.

Click here to read the Chicago Tribune article

…Doesn’t Deter Republicans from Jumping to Obama

In a testament to the possibility that Glenn Beck’s inanities about Barack were a failed attempt to say simply that Obama inspires a sense of unity of the human race, The Sunday Times UK notes the defection of some disillusioned Republicans to Barack. Writer Sarah Baxter reports that supporters of President George W Bush are supporting Barack as “the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation”. In fact, the only official defector cited is Tom Bernstein, who went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief campaign strategist in 2004, has not officially endorsed Sen. Obama, but has said he is the only one he likes. "I think we should design campaigns that appeal, not to 51% of the people, but bring the country together as a whole," Dowd said. Bernstein is a champion of human rights, who admires Obama's call for action on Darfur, while Dowd was the first member of Bush's inner circle to denounce Bush’s "my way or the highway" style of leadership. Baxter also notes how neocon darling Robert Kagan, an informal foreign policy adviser to Republican Senator John McCain, wrote approvingly in The Washington Post that a keynote speech by Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was "pure John Kennedy", a neocon hero of the cold war.

Republicans defect to the Obama camp

Written by Marsha Johnston