Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [224]
By the millennium she was known and recognized throughout the country, even by those who never watched daytime television. She entered the vocabulary as a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Even disgruntled media critics acknowledged they had entered the Oprahsphere. “She puts the cult in pop culture,” Mark Jurkowitz sniped in The Boston Phoenix, prompting Oprahettes to howl about the jerk in “Jurkowitz.” Opraholics worshipped her, and Oprahphiles studied her, making her the subject of more than three dozen PhD dissertations listed in the Library of Congress. The object of a case study on corporate success by the Harvard Business School, she was also studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in a course titled History 298: Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon: Contextualizing the Economics of Race, Gender, Class in Black Business in Post–Civil Rights America. Newsweek declared the new century’s touchy-feely era to be the “Age of Oprah,” and The Wall Street Journal defined “Oprahfication” to mean “public confession as a form of therapy.” Jet magazine used Oprah as a verb: “I didn’t want to tell her … but she Oprah’d it out of me.” Politicians everywhere began “to go Oprah,” holding town meetings to let constituents vent their feelings. Companies lucky enough to have their products featured on “Oprah’s Favorite Things” experienced an avalanche of orders known as the “Oprah Effect.” By 2001, the nation had become so Oprahfied that New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, chose Oprah along with James Earl Jones to lead the memorial service at Yankee Stadium in honor of the victims of 9/11.
With the country in her thrall, Oprah finally felt secure enough to break her “no politicians” rule and wade into their divisive waters. For years she had avoided politics because she did not want to alienate her audience. “If I support one person or another, I will piss a lot of people off,” she said. “And I have not met the politician that was worth going to the mat for. When I do, I certainly will.” By staying above the political fray, she felt she retained more affection from her viewers than her highly partisan predecessor, Phil Donahue. “Oprah would not even attend a Gridiron dinner,” said former Hearst columnist Marianne Means, a past president of The Gridiron Club, whose annual dinner in Washington, D.C., is attended by the president, the vice president, and members of Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Members of the media perform skits and songs poking fun at both political parties. “We invited her many times, but she always turned us down, saying she did not get involved with politics.”
After fifteen years on the air Oprah finally decided to enter the political arena. “She waited until she was rich enough so it wouldn’t affect her bottom line,” said her cousin Katharine Carr Esters. “And that was very smart of her.… But then when it comes to money, no one is smarter than Oprah.”
Once she became a fixture on the Forbes “400 Richest Americans” list, Oprah became part of the nation’s political conversation by extending an invitation in 2000 to the two presidential candidates to appear on her show. “I hope to create the kind of environment and ask the questions that will allow us to break the political wall and see who each one is as a person,” she said through her publicist. The next day’s news was more about Oprah going political than it was about Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush. The headline on Salon.com read, “The Road to the White House Goes Through Oprah.”
Politically, she appeared to be a Democrat, having contributed $1,000 in 1992 to Chicago’s Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat and the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Oprah also donated $10,000 to the Democratic