Barack Obama should pick Oprah Winfrey for his running mate. She is a person of exceptionally good judgment and integrity, marketing savvy, charisma, and accomplishment. Let's begin with good judgment. The day after Colin Powell made his Feb 5th, 2003 UN presentation, making the case for war that the rest of the media was praising, Oprah had the exceptionally good judgment to host a two day anti-war show that was so controversial attempts were made to take it off the air.
Of course lots of people were smart enough to oppose the war, but Oprah immediately sensed the danger of Powell's UN speech and actually took the initiative to immediately broadcast an antiwar show, even recruiting anchors from CNN to beam in clips from people all over the world asking America not to go to war. Then just 48 hours before the war began, Oprah had Michael Moore come on her show to protest the war. The show was praised in the Canadian media as an extraordinary act of intelligence.
The reason Oprah is so stratospherically successful is that she's alway been several steps ahead of America. According to Yale sociologist Joshua Gamson, it was the tabloid talk show craze of the 1980s and 1990s that did more to make gays mainstream than any other development of the 20th century. While Donahue pioneered the genre, it was the stratospheric success of Oprah that transformed it into a thriving industry. This lead to Oprah being named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time, and the richest African American of the 20th century by Forbes. All this before she even turned 50. A profoundly gifted artist, Oprah created a brand new form of media communication that was more intimate and confessional than anything that came before it, and as a trend setting marketing genius, her focus on secular spirituality replaced the intolerant dogma of the church, and her book club did more to expose literature to the masses than anyone since the inventor of the printing press.
Oprah's latest achievement was having the vision to see that a skinny black guy with a funny name had the potential to become president, and endorse him as early as September 2006 (over a year before he captured any other major endorsements). Howard Fineman called her campaign speech in South Carolina one of the best he'd ever seen, and an academic study concluded that Oprah brought him more than a million votes, especially in game changing caucus states like Iowa. The study concludes that Oprah's may well have been the most influential political endorsement in American history (not bad for a woman with no political experience) and she did it with out a single negative word about any of his opponents. Oprah's exceptional skills, judgment, and integrity would be an enormous asset to any administration.