From Daytime TV Queen to Kamala campaign disaster: How billionaire Oprah lost touch with ordinary Americans

The exuberant audience, the smiling chorus of A-list celebrity friends and a beloved broadcaster as fired up and inspirational as ever as she appealed to millions to 'unite for America!'

It was all classic Oprah Winfrey – and it backfired spectacularly.

The live-streamed 'townhall event' which the icon held for Kamala Harris in Detroit back in September had all the glossy razzamatazz, over-excitement and heart-on-sleeve emotion which made Oprah one of the country's most influential and successful television stars.

But in confidently predicting that her friend and ally would soon be sailing into the White House on an 'unprecedented' wave of optimism and energy, she couldn't have been wider of the mark.

Uncharacteristically lost for words, Oprah told a reporter last week that she wasn't going to talk to him about the election, which in the circumstances, is entirely understandable. According to political pundits, the Democrats' reliance on multi-millionaire Hollywood celebrities to tell financially-struggling ordinary Americans what to think went down particularly badly with voters this time.

And the Oprah shindig boasted a small army of these famous faces, including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Lopez.

However the 'Queen of Daytime' has had other reasons to regret the 'Unite For America' rally she hosted after analysis of federal election commission records revealed the Harris campaign had paid Winfrey's company, Harpo Productions, an eye-popping $1 million.

Queen Oprah, now 70, is not a woman who is used to having to justify herself too much and she looked none too pleased when that same reporter asked about her financial dealings with the Harris campaign.

'Is it true that they paid you a million dollars for the endorsement of Kamala?' the journalist pressed.

'Not true - I was paid nothing, ever,' she said as she climbed into her new $170,000 gold Range Rover.

That was that, then, except for the fact that it wasn't quite the full story, as she later admitted in a subsequent Instagram post. Harpo Productions, had received the hefty payment, but despite owning and running the company, Oprah was 'not paid a dime'.

She continued: 'My time and energy was my way of supporting the campaign… I did not take any personal fee. However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.'

But it wasn't. Despite claims that under federal election campaign rules, the Harris campaign was legally obliged to reimburse Harpo Productions for its costs in staging the event at the market rate, it still struck some as entirely wrong that a billionaire such as Winfrey - and one who prides herself on being a Democrat diehard - couldn't have paid the check herself.

The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, her hometown newspaper, delivered a stinging rebuke of Winfrey, under the headline 'Oprah Winfrey should not have asked Kamala Harris for a check.' Oprah, said the newspaper, was chairwoman and CEO of Harpo, and 'the production fees should have been a campaign donation'.

And it added: 'Better yet, rather than do such events, the Harris campaign would have been better advised to let its candidate answer questions from independent journalists and give her more of a chance to explain herself and lay out her plans for America's future.'

According to the New York Times, insiders say the Oprah rally actually cost the Democrats $2.5 million - an almost criminal waste of supporters' contributions.

Even if Team Harris was legally obliged to pay Oprah's company $1 million (and one wonders if organizers couldn't have done the 90-minute gig a little cheaper given it was Democrats' hard-earned money paying for it), the fact that so many have been keen to condemn her speaks volumes for Oprah's slipping currency nowadays.

That currency, which soared for decades as Oprah was endlessly hailed by a breathless media as not only one of the most influential people in the world but even of the 20th century, was only months ago shaken by accusations that she was a shameless hypocrite over her connection with WeightWatchers

It's quite the turnaround for the talk show host-turned-media mogul who appeared (when she wasn't doling out free cars to audience members) to have the magic touch in being able to connect with ordinary Americans and understand what matters to them.

We all know that Winfrey overcame a tough childhood, born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi and raised without indoor plumbing. And while she still clearly has many devoted fans, it's hard to expect the common touch from a billionaire who owns more than a dozen homes including a $50 million estate in Montecito, California, where neighbors include the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston; and 2,100 acres of land on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

According to Forbes, which puts her wealth at $3 billion, (that could pay for 3,000 million Kamala Harris town hall rallies), she 'transitioned her hit talk show, which ran for 25 years until 2011, into a media and business empire'.

And that impressive wealth-creating record has included a very lucrative connection with the dieting giant WeightWatchers for which she was its most important ambassador for almost a decade.

However, that alliance came embarrassingly unstuck in December last year when Oprah, who has fought a long battle with her weight, admitted she'd shed 40lbs after taking a weight-loss drug.

This was a clear no-no for WeightWatchers, a company that had built its international success on healthy controlled eating and iron willpower as the keys to achieving sustainable weight loss.

Oprah, dubbed America's 'dieter-in-chief' when she joined the WeightWatchers board in 2015, would go on to earn $221 million selling the company's stock over the years, owning some 10 percent of the company.

Her critics were particularly infuriated, some going online to brand her a 'hypocrite', that just two months before admitting in an interview she was taking the unnamed weight loss drug, Winfrey had publicly derided such medications as 'the easy way out'.

Oprah didn't reveal which drug she used, although many speculated that she had got a prescription for Ozempic.

In January, fitness expert Jillian Michaels attacked Oprah for her 'financial interest' in Ozempic after WeightWatchers embraced the revolution and bought a company, Sequence, which prescribes the drug to people wanting to lose weight.

'Oprah has a financial incentive with Ozempic,' said Michaels. 'Oprah, I believe, is one of the biggest shareholders of WeightWatchers, and WeightWatchers is now in the Ozempic business… I think it's important to put that out there right off the bat.'

In February, Oprah acknowledged the apparent appearance of a conflict of interest was too great and stepped down from her board position at WeightWatchers, donating her shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The following month saw the release of an Oprah documentary in which she praised the revolutionary arrival of weight-loss injections and attacked those who shame people who turn to such drugs. And in May, Winfrey - who has a long history of promoting potentially dangerous fad diets such as liquid-only ones - apologized for helping popularize unhealthy 'diet culture', saying: 'I own what I've done, and now I want to do better.'

But some of the criticism of her from other women has been fierce. 'Ok… so Oprah is on Ozempic and telling us to love our bodies the way they are,' one angry Instagram user replied to a video shared by Jen Hatmaker, an author and podcast host who was invited to participate in Winfrey's documentary. 'That's rich.'

It's certainly undeniable that while the diets that Oprah used to recommend to her viewers might have been criticized as ineffective and even potentially harmful, they were at least cheap. A course of Ozempic costs as much as $1,000 a month, if you don't have insurance.

Oprah may be losing weight, say critics, but she's also losing credibility. Her bombshell 2021 interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex was another example. Insiders were anxious to stress that neither Winfrey nor broadcaster CBS paid the couple for the interview.

However, they hardly needed to, given the two hours of free, primetime publicity she gave Harry and Meghan to put forward their factually-flawed case.

Winfrey, who'd once had a reputation for asking tough questions but was also a guest at the Sussexes' 2018 Windsor Castle wedding, was putty in their hands - never challenging their more outrageous claims and fanning the flames of their shocking allegations of Royal Family racism.

When America started to wake up to the couple's less fine points - with South Park devoting an entire episode to mocking them, comedian Chris Rock saying it hadn't been racism but normal 'in-law' behavior and opinion polls showing the Sussexes plummeting in US affections - their fawning friend down the road in millionairesville Montecito looked once again out of touch and too cozy with her famous chums.

Oprah now has four years of what will likely be, for her, Trump administration misery to help her reconnect with faithful fans. But whether she'll ever regain that common cause with ordinary Americans seems unlikely.