I Have to Give Oprah Some Credit

While I was unaware of this in advance (darn, my RSS feed from Oprah.com must be broken!), Oprah had some big event the other night that encouraged lemmings to come to her website.

Well, I guess traffic was so overwhelming that her servers crashed.

But kudos to the woman who puts the O in narcissism.

Rather than playing the card that political campaigns will take in considering overflow rooms at events a virtue (rather than poor planning on their part) or meteorologists who tell us that storms "came late" or "decided to miss us" (rather than bad prediction on their part), Harpo Productions put out a press release apologizing and taking full responsibility for the error.

We will resume complaining about her at the nearest opportunity, but for now she gets the responsible PR smiley face for the day.

More on Oprah

One of my favorite newly-discovered blogs, BigheadDC is all over the Oprah stuff from the weekend.

Apparently she didn't pack as many butts in the seats as planned. But conversely, her seat did have a lot of butt in it.

The Two Oprahs

I'm not exactly buying my ticket to Stockholm on my observations in this post, but it's just so funny to me that I could not pass up the opportunity to post it up.

As has been noted ad nauseum, Oprah Winfrey hit the campaign trail this weekend for fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.

What strikes me, though, is that this Oprah speaks quite differently from the one we often see. In front of this integrated audience in South Carolina, her verbal intonations were strikingly different from the one we see on her show every day.

Now, I'll grant that the show is generally on topics of less importance than who will become the leader of the free world, so for guidance, I needed an appropriate comparison speech. In desperation, I looked back less than 24 hours when she was in front of a heavily-white crowd in Iowa giving what one would think would be identical speeches.

Whoah, Nellie. No way, no how.

She's really laying it on thick in one or both of these speeches...and her arms are strong from all the shoveling practice she's had.

Oprah In Front of an Integrated Crowd in South Carolina on Sunday


Oprah In Front of a Largely-White Crowd in Iowa 24 Hours Before

The O's 0-Factor

There's some new polling out from the folks at Pew suggesting that Oprah's endorsement of Obama will have no net effect....

According to their research, while he could get a 15% lift from her, she'd have the same amount of drag on other voters.

I don't know what to make of it (probably nothing!) but I thought I throw it up on a Friday that is creeping along too slowly. I need sleep....

Multiple O's

Oprah Winfrey held her much-anticipated fund raiser for her fellow O-man last night in Santa Barbara.

Oprah's got just as much right as anyone else to distribute her opinions, money and influence on a political race about race. I get that.

But I still find her involvement here to be a bit disturbing. While one of my three loyal readers might correct me, I've been scanning my memory of a recent race when a more valuable, non-compulsory endorsement was thrown into a Presidential campaign.

Presidents Reagan and Clinton, both very popular at the ends of their reigns, endorsed their veeps in their bids to hand off the torch but only their failure to do so would have been newsworthy. (In fact, of course, the limited role Bubba played in Albert's run was exponentially more costly than anything that went on in Florida.)

Race-baiting bigots Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson like to fancy themselves kingmakers whose blessings are necessary for someone running for the Democratic nod, but their influence is not even in the same universe as the queen of Harpo Productions.

But Oprah just seems different to me. I work with some women who seem to just swear by anything that comes out of her mouth and have generalized her celebrity to an overall belief about Oprah's goodness and wisdom.

And she didn't have to be involved here. While she has had the candidates and their wives come through her studios in the past two national elections, she was not taking the explicit role of an advocate for an individual candidate.

I don't think it's possible to overestimate the importance of her endorsement here. This will remain a story throughout at least the primary season.

O for O

Well, I just cruised on over, for the first time, to Oprah.com.

This is an interesting place to be.

Most places have at least a somewhat limited scope in their brand promise. Consider Amazon, for instance. Its header reads:

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Oprah is a bit more ambitious. Is there any human endeavor not covered in her site's header?

Oprah.com is your leading source for information about love, life, self, relationships, food, home, spirit and health.

Anyway, the woman who can do it all for you also hopes to do it all for her favorite candidate...Barack Obama. She's hosting a fundraiser for him in September out in Santa Barbara.