Fourteen months ago, a Gallup/USA Today poll found 74% of Americans had a favorable view of the TV personality.
Then on May 1 last year, Oprah announced during....
the Larry King show that she was, for the first time, going to throw her considerable weight behind a political candidate -- Obama. King's suspenders nearly snapped.
“I think," she told old Lar, "that my value to him, my support of him, is probably worth more than any check.” Although, to be honest, her estimated $2.5 billion in wealth could buy an awful lot of TV ads in Indiana. It might even be able to purchase the Hoosier State.
But little attention has been paid to the effect of Obama on Oprah. Now along comes Costas Panagopoulos, an assistant professor of political science at New York's Fordham University, to ask and answer just that question.
Writing at Politico.com, he suggests the aging empress of TV has paid a price for getting into the dirty business of politics with and for her man Barack. By August last year, a CBS poll found her favorable rating had plunged from 74% to 61%, still twice as good as the president but nearly a 20% drop.
I don't think that anybody could have predicted just how prickly and defensive Hillary supporters would have turned out to be. And yeah I do have experience with women and probably should have been expecting it.
But my naivete was in thinking that once we entered the political spectrum we would all be looking for the best candidate, not the one that personally empowers us.
I really do believe that Hillary still benefits from a block of support that refuses to accept that a woman will not get a turn to be President this election cycle. And that these supporters cannot be deterred by any embarrassing or underhanded thing that Hillary does. They are with her to the end, and what is more they cannot understand why ALL women are not on board with them.
They believe that ANY woman who does not support the female candidate is a traitor to her sex. And that ALL critical coverage is simple misogynist bullying by a country and media that cannot accept a woman as the leader of this nation.
But it is informative that the majority of this support comes from women who are in their forties or older, and less reflective of younger women who come to this political season with open eyes and a lack of gender based frustrations at the status quo.
So these voters, and they are not exclusively female since there are some older men as well, cannot get passed the words of Jeremiah Wright and the fact that Obama did not run away from his church years ago, but do not see Hillary's obvious lie about Bosnia as problematic. They are in fact suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance. (My daughter, who is just about to turn 21, made the comment that she could not support Hillary because she keeps playing the "chick card". This was in reference to the convenient use of tears and of playing the victim when things get tough. Even Bill made reference to the media "beating up on a girl". That is insulting to females of my daughters generation.)
And I should not simply give a pass to the African American community either. I am certain that there are supporters of Obama from this community whose support could not be swayed no matter what unfortunate truth they learned about Obama. It just so happens that the majority of Americans are with them in supporting their candidate so nobody challenges them on their reasons for supporting him.
But that is why Oprah is such an important figure in this election.
She quite literally has skin in both sides of this battle. Being a black woman with the choices of voting for a black or a woman, Oprah cannot simply rely on her first instinct to guide her. She had to look past the gender and skin color of the candidates and see who they really were. And she was so blown away by who Barack Obama was that she felt compelled to break her own rule of never endorsing a candidate and even decided to gamble with her billion dollar business to help make sure he was elected.
That is how ALL of us should be looking at this nomination process. Who is the BEST choice to lead this country.
The continual playing of the victim card is what gets me. It might work if she were running against a white male. But she's not. She's running against a black man (and spare me the bit about how he's half-white, as far as white America is concerned, he's black). As in, can't plan a trip of 500 miles without adding a couple of hours because he knows he'll get stopped at least twice for Driving While Black. As in, a quarter of his fellow black male high school classmates are in jail or on probation. As in, more college-age black men in jail than in college. As in, white women cross the street when they see him coming. Now, when you can show me middle-aged white women being pulled over for Driving While Female, 25% of white females in jail or on probation, white females vastly under-represented in colleges, and people crossing the street when they see white females coming, maybe then Hilary could use the victim card. But using it when she's running against a black male? WTF? Is she really that insensitive regarding the state of race relations in this country today?!
ReplyDeleteBTW, you'll note that Obama *never* plays the victim card. Ever. When things go down hard on him, he *never* says "you're just biased against me because I'm black." He addresses whatever point is in question, e.g. the Wright question, and moves on. Much preferable to all that whining coming out of the Hillary camp....
You are very correct about Obama badtux. He never plays the victim or makes lame excuses.
ReplyDeleteThat is why he is the President that we all deserve.