US:It was, if you stopped to think about it, a rather incredible event. A woman born in Mississippi to a poor, unmarried mother who rose to huge fame and fortune, standing on stage beside a fellow African-American who was largely unknown a year ago but is now vying to become the 44th president of the United States.
Barack Obama acknowledged as much when he addressed his friend and now active supporter, Oprah Winfrey, on Saturday night. "Me being here is so unlikely," he said in front of 10,000 people in a sports hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa's second-largest city. "Just like Oprah being where she is is so unlikely. The odds are so small."
He paused to let the thought sink in, 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'."
That urgency swept this weekend through three states whose early primary elections a few weeks away could prove crucial in determining who takes the keys to the White House in January 2009.
Ten thousand people turned up to hear Winfrey lend her backing to Obama in Manchester, New Hampshire, last night; many more than that did likewise in a stadium seating 80,000 in South Carolina earlier in the day, in the largest rally of the elections so far; and on Saturday, 18,000 assembled in Iowa's capital, Des Moines, in addition to the crowd that battled through heavy snow to be here in Cedar Rapids.
The task was clear: could the queen of daytime talk television use her celebrity power that brings 46 million viewers to her show each week to overcome the unlikelihood of Obama's candidacy? It was an unfamiliar challenge.
She told the crowd 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."
At times she was strangely muted, her head down reading from notes at a podium. Where was the Oprah swagger, the march into the audience to quiz someone about their most intimate secrets?
Instead, she gave a lecture on the trouble with education, healthcare and poverty - and on 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 her 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."
With Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton by three points in Iowa and trailing by equal measure in New Hampshire, he still faces a daunting task against the relentless Clinton machine.
"We are in a defining moment in our history," Obama said, and thousands fell silent. "Our nation is at war, the planet is in peril, the dream that so many generations fought for feels that it is slowly slipping away."
Two words were never mentioned: Clinton and Hillary. But his rival was the elephant in the hall - alluded to in references to conventional Washington politics, the old corridors of power, the need for clarity in foreign policy.
"If you stand with me," Obama boomed out, "we will not only change America, we will change the world. God bless you, Cedar Rapids!" With that he turned around to hug a beaming Winfrey, who for once in her life had been thoroughly out-Oprahed.