Stars align in Iowa: It’s Bill vs. Oprah
DES MOINES, Iowa - Both are legendary communicators. Both helped build an ethic of empathy, turning the public confession into a rite of passage. Both are world-renowned - one for being a former president, the other for a TV show usually identified just by her first name.
And now, Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey are set to square off, in Iowa, campaigning for their favorite candidates.
The looming showdown between Clinton (who arrives here today to campaign for his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) and Winfrey (who appears in two weeks to campaign for Sen. Barack Obama), besides marking a rare collision of talent and fame on the campaign trail, is a sign of just how competitive the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus has become, especially when it comes to attracting women voters.
“They are perfect closers for this campaign that is becoming a nail-biter,” said Donna Brazile, a consultant to Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000 who is neutral in this race.
Winfrey’s appearance, announced by the Obama campaign Monday, is significant on several fronts. Despite her overwhelming popularity, the talk-show host has never endorsed a presidential candidate before. More importantly, Winfrey - ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful voices in public life, the host of the top-ranked television talk show for more than two decades - is arguably the only person capable of countering Hillary Clinton’s most empathetic surrogate.
The campaign of former Sen. John Edwards, who is in a three-way tie with Clinton and Obama in the caucuses here, is not above sending its own celebrities in search of women voters. The campaign recently dispatched a group of women - ranging from his daughter Cate and abortion-rights activist Kate Michelman to singer Bonnie Raitt - onto the trail, where his campaign frequently boasts of 1,500 named women supporters in Iowa alone.
Clinton has put gender at the center of her candidacy and almost always surrounds herself with women, both prominent and not, on the campaign trail; traveling here Sunday, she put Christie Vilsack, the well-known wife of the former governor, in view of the cameras as she talked to reporters. The campaign announced that today Susan Lynch, the wife of New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, will be among her supporters.
She also has the support of the advocacy group EMILY’s List, which announced a statewide drive to turn out women voters for Clinton. The announcement claimed, in 2004, “more than 80 percent of active Democratic women did not attend” the caucuses, and, so far this year, that same pocket of women - the ones less likely to attend on caucus night - “give the greatest margin of support” to Clinton.
That is in keeping with the Clinton campaign’s view that it will perform well if it can turn out people, particularly women, who did not participate last time or who have never participated before. Still, Obama is running about evenly in Iowa with Clinton among women, according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. At the national level, Clinton has greater support from women.
Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife, is also planning swings through Iowa on Wednesday and Thursday, further proof that he is ceding no ground to Clinton when it comes to female voters.
The appearance of the former president comes on the heels of an increasingly heated debate over how much credit Clinton can claim for having served as first lady. In an interview with ABC that was slated to air Monday night, Obama made his most dismissive comments to date about Clinton’s efforts to count those years as “experience.”
“I think the fact of the matter is that Senator Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it,” Obama said.