More Obama

The Wall Street Journal has a great opinion piece by Dan Gerstein on how the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are symbolized by the celebrity endorsements of Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Streisand, respectively. At the outset, it recognizes that celebrity political endorsements are generally insignificant (or more precisely, as "just another episode of the Democratic Party's long-running series of superstar superficiality."). However, Gerstein goes on to highlight why in this case there's something larger at play:

More than anything, Oprah is a uniquely transcendent figure in our public life: engaged in serious debates and willing to put her money where her mouth is, yet unsullied by the ugly political and culture wars of the past two decades, and independent in her thinking and affiliations. In this, she personifies the new post-Bush, post-partisan, post-boomer politics Sen. Obama is preaching. She is the way we want things to be (at least those of us outside the narrow margins of the ideological extremes): genuine, unifying, trustworthy, aspirational.

So how did the Clinton campaign respond to the news that Oprah would be stumping for Sen. Obama this coming weekend? Instead of sticking to their core message, and showing the confidence of a true front-runner, they fell into the tit-for-tat trap of countering with the endorsement of the polarizing, '60s-studded Streisand--in essence, the anti-Oprah. In doing so, the Clinton camp did not just fail to blunt or dilute the O-factor, they managed to accentuate it by unwittingly suggesting Mrs. Clinton stands for--like the Streisand anthem--the way we were.

This is a subtle, yet illuminating distinction on how the narratives of these two campaigns ought to be presented by the Obama campaign. Of course, I'm not the only one with advice for Mr. Obama. Karl Rove, the General Tarkin of the Bush administration, recently penned a column for the Financial Times advising Obama on how to handle the Clinton juggernaut.