Daytime TV Queen Oprah Winfrey will be in the house when Barack Obama is formally annointed the Democratic nominee for president, her spokeswoman says.

The popular talk-show host, who campaigned for Obama during the primaries and is considered an asset among black and women voters, will be in the audience during his speech on Aug. 28 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver but won’t introduce him or appear on stage, spokeswoman Angela DePaul says.

DePaul could offer no further details about Winfrey’s plans at the convention but her close friend Gayle King told the syndicated TV program Entertainment Tonight: “Oprah has not been asked to introduce him, is not expecting to be asked to introduce him and I would doubt that she would want to introduce him. She thinks this is his moment. ”

The question is — with Obama already being derided by rival John McCain as a lightweight and compared to celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears — will Oprah’s presence at the speech help him or hurt him?

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Photo credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok. Winfrey speaks during a rally for Obama at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, California, Feb. 3, 2008.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Wednesday he’s likely to make another major speech at the Republican National Convention later this year, as he did in 2004, and that he’s going to join his buddy John McCain on the campaign trail later this year.

The governor spoke of his plans during a lunch session for participants at the Milken Institute Global Conference on the economy.

Schwarzenegger announced on Jan. 31 that he is supporting McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The governor noted that his wife, Maria Shriver,  is a lifelong Democrat who supports Barack Obama. 

Schwarzenegger told the conference that he likes the environmental stands of each of the three presidential candidates: McCain, Obama and Democrat Hillary Clinton.  But said he sided with McCain because he knows him best and has a long working relationship with the Arizona senator.

On Tuesday night, the Milken audience was asked, by a show of applause, which of the three candidates they supported. It was a close call between McCain and Obama who the audience liked the most. Only a handful put their hands together for Clinton, who won the California primary over Obama handily earlier this year.

Because he was born outside the United States, the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger is not eligible to run for president. If he were, perhaps he would not have uttered the line on Wednesday that “Nobody is dying to go to Iowa,” the state that holds the first contest in the presidential nominating process and one where candidates are expected to spend alot of time wooing voters. Schwarzenegger said that when he was extoling the virtues of California.

Reporting by Bernie Woodall

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Photo credit: Reuters/Phil McCarten (Schwarzenegger participates in a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif.)

  LOS ANGELES- One day before potentially make-or-break primaries in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Clinton has lost one of her most loyal foot soldiers, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has  raised eyebrows back home for devoting so much time and energy to her campaign instead of running America’s second-largest city.

Villaraigosa,  a former labor and immigrant rights activist who is considered one of Clinton’s best emissaries to Latino voters, cut short a planned five-day swing through the Texas on Friday – the same day that a local Web site ran a story wondering why he was collecting a full-time salary as Los Angeles mayor while stumping at least part-time for the New York senator.

 And on Monday, the Los Angeles Times followed with a story of its own, noting that Villaraigosa had spent 18 of the last 65 days on the campaign trail for Hillary. The paper said that, while the Clinton campaign bankrolls  the mayor’s flights and hotels, the city had to pay for his accompanying security detail.

The Times said that Villaraigosa’s dedication on behalf of Clinton had already prompted grumbling in Los Angeles City Hall, where the phrase “Where’s Antonio?” has been circulating through the hallways as a popular quip.

 A spokesman for the mayor assured the Times that Villaraigosa hadn’t missed any key events in the city and was always reachable by cell phone, ready to return home at a moment’s notice.    

 And Deputy Mayor Dan Clegg said Villaraigosa considered campaigning for Clinton  “working for the city he loves” because he believes that a Democrat in the White House would be better for Los Angeles.

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LOS ANGELES - About 50,000 independent voters who were confounded by Los Angeles County’s baffling “double bubble” ballot in California’s primary on Super Tuesday won’t get their choice for president counted, election officials say, because it’s now impossible to unscramble their votes.

The two-step ballot required nonpartisans who wanted to vote in the Democratic primary to mark two bubbles on the ballot – one for the party and the second for the candidate.  

While most voters did, an estimated 49,500 were unable to solve the puzzle.

The ballots can’t be tallied by hand because election officials have no way of determining if the voters meant to pick the Democratic or American Independent candidates on the ballot, Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters spokesman Paul Drugan said. The Republican Party did not allow nonpartisans to participate in its primary.

“It’s impossible, you just can’t do it,” Drugan said. “Legally you are determining somebody else’s voter intent and you’re making assumptions and we can’t engage in that at all. It was a flawed ballot.”

Drugan said the botched ballots did not affect the outcome of California’s primary because Hillary Clinton won the county by more than 150,000 votes over Barack Obama and that statewide propositions were not affected.

He said officials were scrambling to scotch the bewildering double bubble ballot in time for a June election. 

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

Los Angeles-based La Opinion, the country’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain on Monday in California’s presidential primaries, choosing both men largely on the basis of their immigrant-friendly stands.

The nod from La Opinion, before California holds its nominating primaries on Super Tuesday, will be welcome by McCain and especially Obama — who covets the fast-growing and potentially crucial Latino vote that chief rival Hillary Clinton has nurtured since her husband Bill Clinton’s days in the Oval Office.

In endorsing Obama and McCain, the 124,000-circulation newspaper focused almost entirely on the issue of immigration, considered a top concern among Latinos, and credited the two men with taking the most immigrant-friendly positions among the candidates in their respective parties.

La Opinion’s editors said Clinton would be “an excellent president” but were unhappy with the New York senator’s refusal to get behind driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

“We were disappointed in her calculated decision opposition to driver’s licenses for the undocumented, which contrasts markedly from the forceful argument in support made by Obama,” the paper said.

“We understand that this is an extremely controversial issue but we believe there is only one position and it is that of the senator from Illinois.”

As for McCain, the paper applauded the Arizona senator’s role as one of the authors of the failed immigration bill that would have granted a “path to citizenship” to the estimated 12 million illegals living in the United States — legislation that badly damaged him with the Republican Party’s conservative base. Illegal immigration has become a potent issue in the U.S. campaign.

La Opinion called McCain’s top challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a “hard-liner” on immigration issue and accused him of changing positions to win the nomination.

“His talk about deporting millions is appalling,” the paper said. “To think about doing so is ridiculous. To propose it is inhumane.”

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SAN DIEGO - Several thousand San Diego State University students were clearly feeling boisterous as they filed into Cox arena on the Southern California campus for a “town hall meeting” with Hillary Clinton at about 12:30 on Friday.

Unfortunately for them, Hillary — borrowing a page from her chronically tardy husband, former President Bill Clinton — was running badly behind. In fact, the candidate, who was scheduled to speak at 1:30, arrived more than an hour late and didn’t greet the throng until shortly before 3 p.m.

While they waited, the good-natured San Diego State students would not allow their Friday afternoon cheer to be diminished and improvised by tearing pages out of their notebooks, fashioning them into paper airplanes, and sailing them around the arena.

The sport quickly took hold and cheers began to greet each airplane as it made a safe landing on the arena floor or crashed into the back of a security guard.

At several points, for no apparent reason and to the puzzlement of jaded, campaign-weary journalists, people in the crowd rose from their seats to do “the wave” for each other.
Clinton was received warmly by the crowd, who applauded her suggestions for a tax break for college students and criticism of student loan companies.

But the event wasn’t without other snafus. San Diego State President Stephen Webber, in thanking Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, mispronounced the mayor’s name as “Villagarosa.”

Two interlopers managed for several minutes to cover Clinton’s hopeful, if generic, “Solutions for America” sign with a much more critical and specific banner of their own (”Nepotist Tyrant Hands Off Iran)” — before they were hustled away by security.

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- Photo Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Clinton speaking to students)

LOS ANGELES - The latest poll shows New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Arizona Sen. John McCain winning by substantial margins in California’s presidential primary — but also that the races remain volatile a week before Super Tuesday on Feb. 5.

The Los Angeles Times/CNN/Politico poll, which was released on Monday, finds the former first lady leading her chief Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, by a margin of 49 percent to 32 percent among likely voters — with ex-North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in third place with 11 percent.

On the Republican side, the poll showed McCain, a senator from Arizona, with a 39 percent to 26 percent edge over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – a significant gain over the last Times poll.  Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani trailed at 13 percent, followed by ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 11 percent.

But the poll was conducted before Obama’s decisive victory in South Carolina on Saturday and endorsement by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy on Monday, and the poll found that about a third of likely Democratic voters said they could change their minds before Election Day.

That margin was even higher for Republicans, among whom more than four in 10 voters said they might switch candidates in the next week.

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– Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria, John McCain signing autographs in Florida

When Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced that the Illinois senator would hold a “Roundtable on Economic Opportunity,” in Los Angeles, reporters could be forgiven for expecting a formal university or conference room setting — perhaps with bearded economists and captains of industry presenting reports and statistics in thick binders and weighing in on the major issues of the day.

But the event itself was decidedly more casual — taking place in the small backyard of Mimi Vitello, a resident of the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys who bought her home with an interest-only loan and is now struggling to make the payments.

The table was very small and — as promised — round, set up on the brown grass while Obama and his four guests, including Vitello, sat on plastic lawn chairs not far from her carefully pruned roses. Reporters and news crews were kept at bay behind a white rope.

Obama wore rolled up shirtsleeves and a blue tie and spoke casually to the press from his seat, before chatting with Vitello and his other guests about their struggles with credit card debt and home loans. A slightly confused dog barked intermittently from the next yard over.

The candidate commiserated with his guests about the struggles of making ends meet, telling a story about driving his future wife, Michelle, on dates in a car so full of rust holes that he could see the road as he drove and taking 10 years to pay off student loans.

Obama pledged government oversight of the mortgage and credit card industries but was asked by a member of the press about reports that he had raked in significant campaign contributions from Wall Street.

“We have raised money without taking it from PACs and federal lobbyists,” he responded. “There’s no doubt I’ve gotten money from Wall Street. That’s where the money is. But we have raised more money from small contributors than any other campaign.”

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– Photo credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok