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LIVING POLITICS
Howard Fineman
Scott Olson
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Getty Images
Star Power
Barack Obama couldn't have hoped for a better endorser than Oprah. Problem was, she outshone the candidate.
Dec 9, 2007 | Updated: 5:36 p.m. ET Dec 9, 2007
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Forty years ago, when Andrea Perry was a cheerleader at St. Bonaventure, administrators at the upstate New York school barred her from traveling to Columbia, S.C., with the basketball team. The sad but obvious reason: she was black.
But history works in wondrous ways.
As fate would have it, Perry, a third-generation New Yorker, moved here to Columbia in 1978. She worked for the University of South Carolina, sending her daughter, Philana, to the just-desegregated public schools. Now, on a sunny Sunday all these many years later, mother and daughter joined 20,000 others who listened with rapt attention to Oprah Winfrey introduce Sen. Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.
"I thought it was all downhill after the Kennedys were killed," said Perry. "I put politics aside. I'm 60 years old and I've never had a bumper sticker, never worn a T-shirt like this" – she pointed to her blue Obama T. "Maybe it's not all downhill after all," she said. "He was everything I expected," she said. "Not an opportunist, but an honest guy."
If Obama hopes to win, here and elsewhere, he has to hope he makes the sale he made to Andrea Perry.
In a sun-splashed football stadium, the crowd—black and white, young and old—gathered to hear the hip-hop funk of the '90s hip-hop group Arrested Development, followed by Michelle Obama, who gave way to Oprah, who gave way to the candidate.
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