Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [235]
“You didn’t expect you’d be caught?”
“No, I did not,” he finally admitted.
She had packed the audience with young, pretty women, whom Jeff Simon described in The Buffalo News as looking at Clinton at certain moments “the way they’d look at a chocolate sundae; at others, the way they’d look at an infant’s first steps to the couch.”
Oprah’s ties to Clinton were strong. She attended his inauguration in 1993 and his first state dinner in 1994. In December 1993 she stood by his side in the White House as he signed the National Child Protection Act to establish a database network for all indictments and convictions on child abuse and sexual molestation. This law was known informally as the “Oprah Bill.”
Both Southerners from broken homes, Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey had a great deal in common. Each had risen from roots of meager expectations to achieve worldwide success based on a superlative ability to communicate. Both had well-publicized weight problems and were, in the words of Clinton, “secret keepers,” who knew how to live parallel lives—one in public, the other in private. Appearing together, they were mesmerizing. He gave her the second-highest overnight rating of the season, and she gave him a boost in book sales. It was a mutually admiring and advantageous relationship until July 27, 2004, when a young man running for the U.S. Senate gave the speech of his life at the Democratic National Convention. That evening Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric and inspiring message rocked the convention and swept him into the hot strobes of national recognition. Among those leaping with joy was Oprah, deeply moved by his magical delivery. “It was one of the most extraordinary speeches I’ve ever heard,” she told him later. “There’s a line in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman [a 1974 TV movie based on Ernest J. Gaines’s novel] when Jane is holding a baby and asking, ‘Will you be the one?’ While you were speaking, I was alone in my sitting room cheering and saying, ‘I think this is the one.’ ”
After that speech, Oprah, who barely knew the Obamas, asked to interview them for the November issue of O, which strategically hit the stands days before the election that sent him to Washington as only the third African American to sit in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. By then Oprah had embraced the young senator as “my favorite guy.” She introduced him to her viewers in January 2005 as part of a show titled “Living the American Dream.” She honored his wife, Michelle, a few months later by including her as a “young ’un” during “The Legends Weekend,” and the following year she publicly endorsed him for president, months before he had endorsed himself.
During his Senate campaign, Obama had opposed the Iraq War as unnecessary, and by then Oprah, too, had changed her stance. Subsequently, she invited the esteemed New York Times columnist Frank Rich on her show (October 12, 2006) to discuss his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, which indicted the Bush administration for selling the war to the country on false premises. Entitled “Truth in America,” the show included an appearance by Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar of the Poynter Institute, to discuss looking at the world from different points of view. He later reported in his online column that Oprah was dynamic, intelligent, funny, charismatic, and beloved by the women in her audience. “She walked out onto the stage, before the cameras started rolling, holding her shoes in her hand, a very down-to-earth image, but when she sat down, her shoe person rushed onstage, knelt down, and put them on for her. A coronation of sorts, if you can crown someone’s feet.”
At Fox News, Bill O’Reilly was going postal over Oprah devoting her entire show to Frank Rich. “She has declined to interview me, even though I had four number one bestselling books,” O’Reilly fumed. He went on the air four nights later with a segment “Is Oprah Fair and Balanced?” during which he claimed