Most of the attention on the effect of Double O -- Obama and Oprah -- has been focused on how much the daytime television diva helped her home-state senator by endorsing him and appearing at all those rallies in Iowa and South Carolina with him.
The 54-year-old Chicago TV hostess also helped raise a hefty chunk of change by loaning out her Montecito estate for that Barack Obama fundraiser last summer.
Oprah Winfrey has long enjoyed an immense popularity tied to her long-running show, which started in 1986. So well known is she that one name will suffice.
In one 1999 survey of the most admired and respected 20th century women, Oprah (26%) came in second only to Mother Teresa (33%). Fourteen months ago, a Gallup/USA Today poll found 74% of Americans had a favorable view of her.
Then on May 1 last year, Oprah announced during CNN's "Larry King Live" that she was for the first time going to throw her considerable popularity behind a political candidate -- Obama. King's suspenders nearly snapped.
"I think," she said, "that my value to him, my support of him, is probably worth more than any check."
But little attention has been paid to the effect of Obama on Oprah. Now along comes Costas Panagopoulos, an assistant professor of political science at New York's Fordham University, to ask and answer just that question.
Writing at Politico.com, he suggested Winfrey has paid a price for getting into the dirty business of politics. By August 2007, a CBS poll found her favorable rating had dropped, from 74% to 61%.
Recently, her rating dipped a bit more, to 55%.
And Panagopoulos pointed to an AOL survey of 1.35 million Americans that found 46% said the daytime TV host who "made their day" was Ellen DeGeneres, while only 19% chose Winfrey. Panagopoulos drew the conclusion that celebrity endorsers run the risk of costing themselves more than they benefit the endorsee.
But then, how many hundred million dollars a year does an assistant professor at Fordham pull down?
Do shake-ups matter?
If one measure of a presidential candidate's potential effectiveness in office is staff management and cohesiveness, there's a clear winner among the remaining contenders.
It's not John McCain, who last summer discovered he wasn't on the same page with either his campaign manager (Terry Nelson) or chief strategist (John Weaver). Both departed, leaving behind an empty treasury and a candidate whose prospects appeared to be on life support.
