What Oprah Can Do for Obama

The money, power and influence are as obvious as the racial kinship. But there may be something more significant in Oprah Winfrey’s decision to go all-out for Barack Obama.

What she can bring to his campaign is the human connection with voters--the empathy that has made her the world’s most influential woman and that has so far been missing in Obama’s public persona.

For all the passion and fervor he aroused last year, Obama has remained a rather distant figure--cerebral, well-spoken and tentative as an in-fighter--through the early months of Presidential debating. In some ways, the idea of him has been more appealing than the actuality.

This weekend, at her California estate, Winfrey will be raising an anticipated $3 million for the candidate. That could be only a start.

"My money isn't going to make any difference,” she has said. “My value to him--my support of him--is probably worth more than any other check that I could write."

But the influence that can make best-sellers out of obscure books is not the issue. The phenomenon that is Oprah rests on her combination of openness, vulnerability and steely determination that has attracted millions of devoted admirers.

Barack and Michelle Obama are well-educated, highly attractive people from upper-middle-class America. If Oprah can pass on to them a measure of the warmth and compassion that brought her from the depths of poverty to the pinnacle of wealth and power, that could be her greatest contribution of all.

Caesarian Delivery for Fred Thompson?

If the unborn can have growing pains, the Washington Post suggests that the Fred Thompson campaign is suffering, citing fund-raising shortfalls, staff shakeups and, that direst of ills, message atrophy.

"The campaign's been on the vine too long," a Republican strategist is quoted as saying.

All this suggests that the “Waiting for Godot” phase of the Thompson campaign will end sooner rather than later with a formal entrance on the Presidential stage to transform the long-time character actor into a political star.

The burning question for political analysts is whether Thompson’s laid-back style will have enough appeal for the Republican base, which usually favors more fire and brimstone.

His announcement performance may be crucial. Will he evoke Cicero (“How well he speaks”) or Demosthanes (“Let us march”). For a party in search of a hero, that may be the most crucial audition of Thompson’s life.

All the Votes Money Can Buy

Despite the clamor over his defecating dog, Mitt Romney is in clover for the early primary races. Polls show him ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire after starting the year in single digits.

But that was $32 million and 4,500 commercials ago. While McCain, struggling to raise money, lays off staffers and Giuliani keeps repeating his mantra, 9/11, Romney has been selling his blandness like soap or toothpaste, boosting his brand share seven to nine percentage points above them in those early states.

Nationally, the man who has spent $0 million, still undeclared Fred Thompson seems to be proving that absence makes voters hearts grow fonder by taking a 27-24 percent lead over Giuliani.

But Romney can’t keep spending at that pace and Thompson can’t hide forever. Will charisma trump cash? But then again, New York billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, now a former Republican, may come in to run as an Independent.

If he does, the question becomes moot.

The Ecology of Coulter-Edwards

Science defines mutualism, one form of symbiosis, as “an interaction between two or more species, where both derive benefit.” Think bees and flowers.

In putting the relationship of Ann Coulter and John Edwards under the microscope, another example seems more apt: the birds that eat parasites off crocodiles and are in turn protected from predators by their hosts’ giant jaws.

The gnashing of Coulter’s mandibles against him have not only nourished her notoriety (and lecture fees) but served as a fund-raising boon for Edwards.

When she called him a “faggot” in March, his campaign converted it into $300,000 in contributions. This week, when Elizabeth Edwards protested Coulter’s remark about wishing “he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," the fund-raisers went into high gear and raised more money than from any previous e-mail campaign.

So we have here another instance of Nature’s grand design, in which two victims of Reverse Attention Deficit Disorder serve to ease each other’s affliction.