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That’s the conclusion of two University of Maryland economists who correlated vote totals with data such as subscriptions to O magazine and purchases of books endorsed by Oprah’s Book Club. They found a close relation in many polling precincts between O subscribers and Obama backers.
Oprah Winfrey
“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources in their daily life,” Moore told The New York Times. “And for some people Oprah is clearly one of them.”
Economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore tracked celebrity endorsements back to the 1920 presidential campaign and concluded that Winfrey was “a celebrity of nearly unparalleled influence.”
Although she has not confirmed any plans to attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Winfrey has reportedly rented a Colorado home for $50,000 per week.
Other celebrities expected to participate in the convention include Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Spike Lee, Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Forrest Whitaker, Scarlett Johansson and Kanye West.
Stevie Wonder, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow and the Black Eyed Peas are scheduled to perform at convention- related events.
Obama already owes much to the stars – and not only to Oprah. Gwyneth Paltrow produced a video backing the campaign and Hollywood fundraisers have contributed more than $4 million to his campaign.
One of the likely outcomes of John Edwards’ bad judgment is the muting – at least temporarily – of his wife’s public voice.
Over the past year, Elizabeth Edwards, battling an inoperable cancer diagnosed in 2007, has become an outspoken advocate for universal health insurance and a critic of John McCain’s health care proposals.
Edwards campaigned extensively for her husband in both 2008 and 2004. Like her husband, she is an attorney, with a degree from the University of North Carolina Law School. She is also a trustee of the Wade Edwards Foundation, named for their son, who died in 1996, at age 16.
Her memoir, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, was a best seller.
Last night she released a statement about her husband’s admission to having an affair in 2006:
John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007.
This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well.
She asked for privacy, and an end to the “voyeurism” that has included “news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway.”
Both Elizabeth and John Edwards have said their marriage will endure. Yet John Edwards appeared alone last night in his interview with “Nightline.”
Edwards said he’d asked his wife not to accompany him, because “she should not be involved in protecting me from whatever the consequences of this are.”
As the Atlantic reports today, several aides had expected Elizabeth Edwards would speak at the Democratic convention on Monday. But party officials said no invitation had been extended to either John or Elizabeth Edwards.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told reporters in Hawaii that the couple had decided not to participate in the convention. “If I’m not mistaken I think that…the Edwards family indicated that they probably wouldn’t be attending the convention,” Obama said.
After months of denial, John Edwards has admitted he had an affair with a filmmaker who worked for his campaign.
Edwards, a former senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate who campaigned for his party’s presidential nomination this year, told ABC News that he had been involved with Rielle Hunter, 44.
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The pair reportedly met in a New York City bar in 2006. She was later paid $114,000 by an Edwards political action committee called One America Committee to produce website documentaries, ABC reported.
Hunter has said that her six-month contract with the committee terminated on Dec. 31, 2006.
In an interview to be aired tonight, Edwards reportedly says that his wife Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission during the time of the affair and that he told his family of it in 2006.
Edwards also denied that he was the father of baby born to Hunter in February of this year.
Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign worker, has said he is the father of the girl, Frances Quinn Hunter.
Edwards claims his affair with Hunter was over before the child was conceived. He has not taken a paternity test.
The National Enquirer first reported on the affair in October of last year.
At that time, Edwards said the story was “untrue” and “ridiculous.”
The connection with Hunter linked Edwards with novelist Jay McInerney, who dated Hunter, then known as Lisa Druck, in the 1980s.
“When she wasn’t out at nightclubs, she was taking acting classes,” McInerney told the New York Post. “…I spent a lot of time with her and her friends, whose behavior intrigued and appalled me to such an extent that I ended up basing a novel on the experience.”
Druck served as the inspiration for the character Allison Poole in his novel, The Story of My Life, McInerney said.
Hunter has denied both an affair with Edwards and the suggestion that he is the father of her child.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about or what you’re talking about,” she told the Enquirer in December when one of its reporters asked if she had had an affair with Edwards. Last month, the Enquirer reported that Edwards had met with Hunter and the baby in Los Angeles on July 21.
Elizabeth Edwards was first diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2004.
In March 2007, she and her husband announced that her cancer had returned. The cancer was described as not curable, but treatable, and Edwards continued to campaign with her husband.
John Edwards announced his campaign for president on Dec. 2006. He suspended his campaign on Jan. 30, 2008, after having fared badly in primaries.
In Newsweek.com today, Mark Hosenball reports that Edwards insisted that tonight’s ABC “World News Tonight” and “Nightline” interview be conducted by Bob Woodruff, the former ABC anchor who was seriously injured while reporting in Iraq.
ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross and producer Rhonda Schwartz wrote the version of the story first posted on ABCNews.com.
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The ad, titled “Celeb,” calls Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world,” and juxtaposes images of the Democratic presidential candidate with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Kathy Hilton posted her response to the ad on Huffington Post yesterday morning, calling the video a waste of McCain supporters’ money, not to mention voters’ time and attention.
Hilton concluded that the ad “is a completely frivolous way to choose the next president of the United States.”
Hilton and her hotel-magnate husband have given $4,600 to McCain’s campaign in the past year.
Paris Hilton released a statement through her representative last week stating that her permission was not given or requested for the McCain campaign’s use of her image.
New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert wrote Saturday that McCain was “calling out Barack Obama on race,” connecting him to highly-sexed white women who are “notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear.”
Race, Herbert wrote, is the only reason “the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.”
Steve Schmidt, a senior advisor to McCain countered, “It’s beyond dispute that (Obama) has become the biggest celebrity in the world.”
McCain’s camp is also running another anti-Obama ad that aligns Obama with a personality who might be considered the polar opposite of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears: Moses. The second ad, titled “The One,” mocks Obama by comparing him to Moses separating the waters of the Red Sea.
Watch the McCain-sponsored ads “Celeb” and “The One” below:
UPDATE:
Paris Hilton has responded to John McCain’s campaign ad with a spoof video, posted on the website Funny or Die.
There’s been much speculation this week that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine may be “very, very high” on Barack Obama’s VP shortlist, as Politico has described it.
We have no insider knowledge of the vetting process, but the parallels between Kaine and Obama – both of whom are Harvard-educated attorneys with Kansas roots and a civil rights orientation – help explain their unusual chemistry. But those similarities could also prove a liability for the Democratic ticket.
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Like Obama and his wife, both Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, a lawyer and former judge, graduated from Harvard Law School. Holton and Michelle Obama also attended Princeton, although at different times.
That background no doubt attests to both couples’ smarts, but at a time when so many Americans are wary of intellectual achievers whom they see as elitists, the notion of four Harvard-educated lawyers in the White House may not play well in some quarters. (Perhaps that’s why The New Republic has posted a video of Kaine riffing on a harmonica with a blue-grass band as evidence he might cut it with regular folks.)
Kaine, 50, an early Obama supporter, also shares Obama’s preoccupation with civil rights. After graduating from Harvard, Kaine had a law practice specializing in representing people who had been denied housing opportunities because of race or disability. He also taught legal ethics for six years at the University of Richmond Law School.
Like the presumptive Democratic nominee, he boasts of a bipartisan orientation, an assertion that owes less to his record in the Virginia statehouse than the fact that his father-in-law, Linwood Holton, was the state’s Republican governor from 1970 to 1974.
Howard Fineman over at MSNBC points out that Holton, who is about to turn 85, remains a hero to liberal Democrats and African Americans in the Old Dominion.
Back in the 1970s, when public school busing and racial integration was creating a new faction of the GOP — one appealing to the fears and prejudices of working-class white southerners — Holton stood his ground.
As governor of Virginia, he sent his children, including his daughter, Anne, to public schools in Richmond to prove his point.
The political friendship between Kaine and Obama is said to have begun shortly after Obama spoke before the Democratic convention in 2004. At Kaine’s invitation, Obama came to Virginia to campaign for him in 2005 as he ran for governor.
Kaine reciprocated last year by becoming the first prominent elected official outside of Illinois to endorse Obama for president.
It may be relevant too, as Fineman suggests, that the two men share a political consultant – the Benenson Strategy Group whose founder, Joel Benenson is advising Obama. The group’s principal consultant, Peter Brodnitz, who gained his reputation handling Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, is advising Kaine.
Kaine does bring some things to a Democratic ticket that Obama lacks. A practicing Catholic who spent close to a year working as a missionary in Honduras, Kaine would presumably appeal to swing Catholic voters, even though political scientist Larry Sabato points out, “he is pro-choice in effect while projecting a pro-life image and accepting of the death penalty despite personal opposition to it.”
Kaine is also fluent in Spanish and would presumably appeal to growing numbers of Latino voters.
Most critically, if he could help Obama win Virginia, which has voted Republican in 13 of the last 14 presidential contests, that could give Obama a decisive Electoral College advantage, according to Sabato.
On the negative side, however, those skeptical of Obama’s readiness to lead the nation may feel the same way about Kaine. With scant background in military and foreign policy, in particular, Kaine would be unlikely to reassure those who have trouble seeing Obama as commander in chief.
Although Kaine has more executive experience than Obama as a sitting governor and a former mayor of Richmond, many pundits there say his record of achievement as a state leader is mixed, in part because he has been unable to move much through a Republican-controlled state legislature.
Finally, as someone relatively new to the Big Leagues, he could hammer away at the Democrats’ change theme – but that would cut both ways since he has little national name recognition.
Which is to say, he might be “Obama squared “– a smart, charismatic and a formidable campaigner, but without enough of a track record to make his promise of change seem credible.
Elizabeth Edwards
