London, Nov.27: Democrat residential candidate and Illinois Senator Barack Obama has roped in Oprah Winfrey, the queen of American daytime television, to raid Hillary Clinton’s core support among women voters in the contest.

Obama announced on Monday that Oprah would campaign alongside him in Iowa, the crucial first state that kicks off the nominating process on January 3, before taking her to the other key early battlegrounds of New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The billionaire television show host, rated the second-most-influential woman in the US behind Mrs Clinton, has already demonstrated her power to sway sentiment among viewers, with her book club catapulting obscure novels into the bestseller lists, says The Times.

Obama, who trails Hillary Clinton by a wide margin among women voters in national opinion polls, has suggested that Oprah’s support “means that I may get a hearing in certain quarters”.

Tomorrow his campaign will unveil “Women for Obama Leadership Committees” in a clutch of states holding primary elections on February 5, or Super Tuesday, which may decide who wins the nomination.

His strategists believe that he can win support from cautious female voters worried that Mrs Clinton is unelectable.

A new poll last night suggested that she trails the top five Republican presidential candidates in head-to-head match-ups.

Such vulnerability is particularly true in Iowa, which has never backed a woman for state-wide office or Congress.

A recent poll in the state, where Obama held a discussion on health policy with women panelists on Sunday, showed that he had edged ahead of Mrs Clinton for the first time and had closed the gap among women voters.

Last night he appeared in a TV interview suggesting that Mrs Clinton would lose her front-runner status if she failed to beat him in the Iowa caucuses.

Clinton will today seek to bolster her position in Iowa by campaigning with her husband, Bill, the former President. The couple are reported to be “setting up camp” in the state for the next 40 days. She spent much of the weekend criticising Obama’s foreign policy credentials and his “kind of confusing” healthcare policy.

The spat among Democratic candidates is positively polite compared with the wildly unpredictable race for the Republican nomination in which the two front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, have exchanged personal insults for the first time. (ANI)