What Obama Has to Do Tonight

In the words of E.M. Forster, only connect. He has spent two years inspiring and dazzling crowds with eloquence, maintaining his rational calm in debates, acting presidential under fire. For tonight's debate, Barack Obama needs a little less JFK, a bit more Oprah.

What may be missing for some undecided voters is a visceral connection to their lives, especially in today's distress, the absence of which has allowed Republicans to stereotype as elitist and detached the man who grew up with a mother on food stamps opposing a privileged son of the military upper crust.

His cerebral, scholarly attitude is central to Obama and, consciously or not, he may feel impelled to separate himself from the emotionalism of the civil rights era. But in his own style, he needs to project some of Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" empathy to win over voters being besieged by attacks about how "different" he is.

In Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," there is a scene in which the Clinton character and his cronies indulge in a maudlin "mamathon" about the virtues of their mothers. As dogged by scandal in 1992 as Obama is now by attacks about class and race, Clinton managed to reach through the TV screen and touch voters in a time when they needed emotional connection much less than they do now.

Perhaps Obama could use a pep talk from his most vocal supporter, Oprah, on how to pass on to Americans a measure of the warmth and compassion that brought her from the depths of poverty to the pinnacle of wealth and power.

With everything else going his way in the final days of the campaign, that might be the last piece of the puzzle to give undecided voters a picture of him in the White House.

The Clintons' September Song

With the days dwindling down to a precious few, Hillary and Bill Clinton can't play the waiting game if they are going to help Barack Obama beat John McCain.

Today, one of the former First Lady's richest and most rabid supporters is going over to the Republican candidate. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a prominent Hillary supporter and member of the Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee, is endorsing John McCain.

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don't like him,” she says of Obama. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

Lady de Rothschild, nee Lynn Forster, is a non-elitist billionaire who is now investing in India. "Two hundred fifty million," she explains, "are middle-class, so you might not go for the Chanel glasses, but you sure could go for an Estée Lauder lipstick or a Starbucks coffee."

With such supporters defecting, Hillary and Bill Clinton don't have much time to start getting out to American places deprived of Estee Lauder and Starbucks to start convincing the inhabitants that Obama is the man to lead their country out of the economic chaos that won't leave Lady de Rothschild jobless and without health insurance.