Ticket Replay: A double O moment -- Oprah and Obama at the same inaugural
The Ticket is republishing this weekend some of our favorite items from recent campaign months. This one looking toward the Obama inauguration on Jan. 20 originally appeared in this space on Dec. 5, 2008:
Shortly before the Nov. 4 presidential voting closed, noted Obama-backer Oprah Winfrey announced that she'd already picked out her inaugural ball gown, a sign of overconfidence that she did not have to pay for in the end.
Now that Barack Obama's inauguration is virtually certain (unless the Supreme Court's ponderings lead it to get involved), Oprah has announced she's taking her Chicago talk show to W
ashington, which is also famous for lotsa talk. (And that'll allow her to write off the gown cost as a business expense.)
She's rented the 2,300-seat Kennedy Center to do two shows there right around Jan. 20.
You may remember Oprah came out early for her fellow Chicagoan. She held a huge celebrity fundraiser for him at her Montecito house.
And she emceed giant primary rallies for him in Iowa and North Carolina, which he won, and New Hampshire, which he lost to Hillary Clinton, the first serious female presidential candidate who many former Oprah fans thought she should support. Winfrey's ratings took a hit.
We don't want to let anything out of the bag and spoil the screaming.
But wouldn't it just be a perfect television moment if, while Oprah is talking to the excited Kennedy Center audience in January at inauguration time, a certain someone who's about to become president and maybe his wife too walked out on the stage behind the show host?
Everyone would cry, except those execs watching the ratings.
--Andrew Malcolm
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Photo credit: Oprah.com
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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