by John McCormick
DES MOINES – First Oprah, now her trusty sidekick, Gayle King.
After he participates Thursday in a Democratic candidate debate sponsored by The Des Moines Register, Sen. Barack Obama is expected to jet up to Iowa’s northeast corner.
There, in Dubuque, he will participate in a “Women for Obama” event that will be streamed live on the Web. King, a close friend of Oprah Winfrey’s
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and one of her employees, will moderate the town-hall-style gathering.Earlier in the day, King will also meet with small groups of women in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who attended last weekend’s events with Winfrey and the Obamas, but who remain undecided about who they will support in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.
King, who hosts her own show on satellite radio that Obama has in the past appeared on, traveled with Winfrey and the Obama’s last weekend as they campaigned in Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire.
Obama’s event with King will mark the start of a six-day campaign bus tour across northern Iowa, where Obama will be followed by a bus full of national reporters, photographers and bloggers. But because of the travel time between the debate and Dubuque, the campaign is not taking Obama’s traveling press corps to the King event, instead driving the pack to another later event Thursday evening.