We can all stop speculating! Oprah will indeed join Barack Obama on the campaign trail. She will be traveling to Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Columbia, South Carolina on the weekend of Dec. 8. It's time to revive the debate of whether the woman who turns paperbacks into gold can have the same effect in politics. Certainly, Obama is banking on Oprah's appeal with female voters. As he said about visiting her show, "there was a level of excitement among these middle-aged women that I’ve never seen. Their eyes glaze over."
Obama's support among women is just about equal to Hillary Clinton's in Iowa, though Clinton seems to be showing an edge among blue collar women. Working class women will almost assuredly stay in Clinton's camp. For women who came of age during an era of feminism, in a less advantaged class level in which the barriers against women are only higher, seeing a woman in power is very meaningful. It vindicates their years of hard work, their roles in bringing equality to women, which have been less celebrated than the work of their more intellectual peers.
Lest we forget, John Edwards has also been aggressively pursuing the female vote, paricularly the working class female vote. Former NARAL president Kate Michelman is one of his senior advisors, and he has even been referred to as potentially the "first woman president." His campaign often equates his fight for bridging the "two Americas" to a fight on behalf of poor women in particular.
Then there is the question how much the female vote really matters in and of itself. At least one report this year called single women "the most eligible untapped voters," no pun intended (I don't think). The report, which came out this summer, showed that unmarried women account for nearly 25 percent of all eligible voters.
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