Oprah Stakes Her Brand For Obama

Ms. Winfrey's support of Mr. Obama -- she has held fund-raisers and arranged several large rallies -- has been written off in some political circles as one more meaningless celebrity endorsement. But it is far from meaningless. Hers could be the first such endorsement to have an impact on national politics, and it also carries considerable risks. Politics may seem like one more extension of Ms. Winfrey's vast franchise, but it is a more complicated business. Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Obama have deep connections: both came of age professionally and personally in Chicago during the 1980s, when she was the host of a local talk show (eventually syndicated) and he was a community organizer who hadn't yet entered politics. They both learned to reach an accommodation with all manner of people and in time arrived at a kind of common language that has taken them to the national stage.

During the early 1990s, when both television talk and the culture at large was heading down a road that led inexorably this week to the pregnancy of Britney Spears's baby sister, Ms. Winfrey hung a right. Banking her franchise on the durable virtues of decency, hard work and self-improvement, she found a bigger audience -- eight million a day -- and turned herself from a multimillionaire into a billionaire.