Oprah on Discount
On a sunny Saturday like today, yard sale signs in Brookside make the place look like it's election time again, except there's crap being sold instead of crappy candidates. But there was one at Gregory and Edgevale this morning that caught my eye. Down at the bottom of the store-bought sign were stickers advertising "Oprah for President '08."
A couple blocks north, I found the home of Patrick Crowe. If you haven't heard of him, the former car wash owner has been trying to get his favorite talk show host to run for president for more than a year now.
And in almost every way, Crowe's campaign has been a rousing success. He’s gotten loads of publicity, appearing on a half-dozen TV shows, on 25 radio programs and in another 10 newspaper articles, from London to Palm Springs. There’s just one thing he hasn’t been able to do: convince Oprah to run.
Crowe isn’t giving up. But as far as the merchandise, that hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves. So this morning, Crowe held a yard sale to unload some of the paraphernalia for his non-Oprah-approved campaign.
Among the stuff were boxes of T-shirts marked down from $17.97 to $6.
Books he wrote on why Oprah would make a fine commander in chief were slashed from $24.97 to $6.
Buttons were marked down from $1.99 to 75 cents.
Among the things he’s not selling is a copy of Barak Obama’s book. Oprah, who has called Crowe twice now to ask him to cut it out, signed the book and sent it to Crowe. (He asked us to black out the phone number, which Crowe says goes to Oprah’s “assistant in charge of correspondence.”)
He's holding on to his Oprah-themed Ford Fairlane convertible.
He's keeping the banner he hung outside his car wash (which he recently sold) to take a straw poll, although he admits he rigged the results.
And he’s also not selling his wife, who admits to being his gofer during the Oprah campaign. Although, judging by how understanding she's been through this, he'd probably do pretty well if he did. -- Eric Barton
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