‘Oprah for VP’ say Obama fans

Barack Obama wheeled out his big gun at the weekend - chat show host Oprah Winfrey - in an effort to pull ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination for presidential candidate. More than 70,000 people came out to see Oprah as she accompanied Obama on a whistlestop tour of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

At a rally in the University of South Carolina's football stadium on Sunday 30,000 people turned up, most of them African-Americans - a record attendance for a political event in the state. Many in the crowd wore badges proclaiming 'Oprah for Vice-President'.

Oprah, who commands a TV audience of more than 7.5m every weekday, said that addressing a political rally felt like "stepping out of the box" for her. "I've never taken this kind of risk before, nor felt compelled to stand up and speak out." (Continued below)

She spoke about education, healthcare, poverty - and what she didn't like about most politicians. "You don't see a lot of politicians on my show. I don't like to mess with politicians, 'cause I only got an hour." Obama was the exception: "It's different with Barack Obama - you get to witness a really rare thing, a politician who has an ear for eloquence and a tongue dipped in unvarnished truth."

Obama, who is three points ahead of Clinton in Iowa - the first state to choose its candidates, with its caucus on January 3 - told a crowd of 10,000 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa's second largest town: "Me being here is so unlikely. Just like Oprah being where she is is so unlikely. The odds are so small."

He then invoked Martin Luther King: "But I'm not in this race because of the odds. I'm in it because of what Dr King called 'the fierce urgency of now'."