Women turn on ‘traitor’ Oprah Winfrey for backing Barack Obama – Oprah fans leave a barrage of negative messages on her official website in response to the talk show host’s support of Obama
AMERICA’S favourite television presenter is paying a painful price for her intervention in the US presidential campaign last month. Oprah Winfrey has been dubbed a “traitor” by some of her female fans for supporting Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton. Winfrey’s website, Oprah.com, has been flooded with a barrage of abuse since the queen of daytime chat shows joined Obama on a tour of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in mid-December. Her intervention was widely credited with broadening Obama’s national appeal – especially among women – and with helping him to an upset victory over Clinton in the first vote of the election year in Iowa.
We hope that our Barbadian audience can forgive us if we digress from writing about all the excitement which has unfolded locally over the past week. The Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton dog fight has intrigued us no end. The fact that Obama has transformed his campaign from that of the underdog to one of a legitimate contender is a credit to his perceived intelligence and charisma by mainstream America. It is no mean feat for a black man to appeal to a wide cross-section of the American vote i.e. Whites and Hispanics.
One of the many side-bar issues which has surfaced in the current run-off for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States is Oprah deciding to throw her influence and money behind the Obama camp. We hate to use terms like liberals and conservatives so we will simple say: people in some quarters are arguing that Oprah Winfrey has betrayed all the women who support her show because she decided to support the man Obama. Have you ever heard such rubbish? Here we have Oprah Winfrey who is reputed to be one of the richest people in the world. We assume that she was able to build her fortune because she would have exercised her brain. She has never given us the impression that she is the type of woman who makes her decisions on her back. Yet we have ‘smug America’ attacking this icon because she has decided to exercise her democratic right to back who the hell she pleases.
Now that we have gotten that off our chest let us bring a more reasoned argument.
As far back as July 2004, there is evidence that Oprah had publicly expressed her love for the IIinois Senator Barack Obama. In other words, the decision for Oprah to support Obama was not made yesterday. A member of the BU household recalls one of the many interviews which Oprah had with Senator Obama when she urged him to inform her if he ever decided to run for President of the United States. She was more than clear then to the world, as she is now, that she had fallen in love with the debonair and smooth talking gentleman from Chicago. For those narrow minded and irrational minds who are saying that Oprah is taking a risk that her predominantly white female following will desert her, we say in a loud voice, WHO THE HELL CARES? The last time we checked Oprah was on the Forbes World’s Richest Magazine list of billionaires for crying out loud.
The BU household would like to ask Oprah why she prefers Obama over Clinton, for the record. Maybe, if we are lucky she or a member of her staff might stumble on our little blog and give us the answer. Back to why we feel Oprah would never endorse Senator Hillary Clinton. Do you remember that little incident when President Clinton got his ‘nuts’ looked after by Monica? President Clinton lied about it until he was forced to ‘come’ clean. Do you also remember that Oprah has told the world about the sexual abuse which she experienced as a teenager? Do you think Oprah can have much respect for a woman who remained married to a man whose exploits as an adulter trail him all the way from Arkansas to Washington? Will never happen!
The reaction by White America to Oprah Winfrey supporting a candidate of her choice, who just happens to be black is insightful in the year 2008. On the day America celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, the United States of America which was built from the sweat of immigrants, Black, White and Yellow is still being embarrassed by the racial divide.
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