Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [237]
Maya Angelou, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Quincy Jones, and Andrew Young felt they owed their allegiance to Senator Clinton because, in the words of Gates, it was Bill Clinton “who brought us to the table.” Standing with Oprah, though, were Gayle King and Stedman Graham, a conservative Republican; plus her father, Vernon Winfrey, who pointed to the Obama poster on his barbershop wall. “I’m supporting him on the issues.… Oprah might be supporting him for something else.” He chuckled about his daughter’s obvious crush on the Illinois senator, an inference that sprang from her flirtatious body language whenever she was around him—what her father called “her adoring eyes and all … I can tell you that Stedman isn’t getting any of that.”
Oprah’s best friend from high school agreed. “Obama is everything she ever wanted,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler. “Light-skinned and Ivy-Leagued.”
Late-night comics chimed in as well. “Over the weekend, Obama celebrated his wedding anniversary,” noted Conan O’Brien. “He went out for a romantic candlelit dinner with just his wife and Oprah.”
Obama’s influence on Oprah was not lost on anyone in Chicago, either. “When Paula Crown needed a star to appear at the Children’s Circle of Care benefit, she went to Barack, and he persuaded Oprah to speak,” said one of the city’s philanthropists. “Otherwise, we would never have gotten her, and she made the evening a smashing success.”
By endorsing Barack Obama for president, Oprah staked out a position that would subject her to criticism and partisan rebuke. “It was awful for her at one point,” recalled Alice Walker. “I remember when she and Gayle came to a wedding at the Bel-Air hotel.… It was shortly after Oprah had refused to have Sarah Palin on her show, and the Republican women in Florida decided to boycott Oprah.… She had tears in her eyes when she told us how they called her the N word.”
Oprah later mentioned the backlash. “I got some hate calls [that were] ‘Go back to Africa,’ ‘We gonna lynch you bad,’ ” she said. “I wasn’t snubbing Sarah Palin. I was just holding true to the policy that I had set for myself [not to invite other candidates on the show].” Two days after the election she invited Tina Fey, the comedienne who had filleted Sarah Palin with her dead-on imitation of the Alaska governor on Saturday Night Live. “I was in Denver—I had just attended the big speech Barack Obama gave—and the next day was when Senator John McCain announced Sarah Palin,” Oprah recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, my god. She’s Tina Fey.’ ”
To appease Republicans after the election, Oprah said she would be happy to ask Sarah Palin to be on the show. “I went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin, and instead she talked to Greta Van Susteren. She talked to Matt Lauer. She talked to Larry King, but she didn’t talk to me,” said Oprah. “But maybe she’ll talk to me [when] she has a book deal.” Sure enough, Palin launched publication of her memoir with Oprah on November 16, 2009, leading to Oprah’s highest ratings in two years.
“Oprah was all about wooing back conservative viewers she’d lost when she endorsed Barack Obama for president,” wrote Lisa de Moraes in The Washington Post, so she veered away from controversial subjects. The next day she interviewed porn superstar Jenna Jameson, who wrote How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, but then the media was more interested in politics than pornography. Two days after the Sarah Palin show, Tina Brown pounded Oprah in The Daily Beast: “She opened up with whether Palin thought she had snubbed her during the ’08 campaign by not asking her on the show. You could see Palin thinking as we in the audience were, ‘Huh? Why the eff are we wasting time talking about you?’ ”
Behind the scenes Oprah made no pretense about her partisan preferences. She strongly supported Cory Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who, like Oprah, was an early and ardent supporter of Barack Obama. The forty-year-old mayor was