The media is harping on Barack Obama's rout of Hillary Clinton among Black South Carolina voters (he got 80 percent of them.) But there are other big numbers that Hillary (and Bill) ought to worry about. First, the overall number. Obama is projected to win the state by a huge margin:
Obama - 53% Clinton - 27% Edwards - 19%
Even if those numbers don't hold exactly, Obama is looking at a huge victory.
The other troubling number for the Clintons: the 20 percent of Black voters who said they would be dissatisfied if she ultimately wins the nomination. Picture bridges burning ...
For the Obama campaign, there are minefields in these numbers, too. The Clintons, for better or for worse, were successful in framing the South Carolina contest as one mostly about race, and their strategy of pushing hard against the Black vote in order to turn out the White vote didn't help Hillary win, but it did reframe the overall contest for White voters who care about that sort of thing. This sort of comment on the MSNBC First Read site should be on the radar screen of Camp Obama:
More than 50% of the turnout was African American and ovevr 80% of African Americans voted for Obama. Lets us also remember that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina and a lot of other southern states in 1984 and 1988.
Recall that Barack Obama never intended to fight for the nomination on this ground. Hell, most Black voters didn't even support him until he won the Iowa caucuses. He has fought his entire campaign on the neutral grounds of change and unity, not on the toxic soil of race. The one-two punch of the simplistic media narrative and the take no prisoners tactics of the Clinton campaign, has forced him onto exactly the playing field he did NOT want to be on. Remember Barack's announcement that he would run last February? It was remarkable in that Barack made that announcement surrounded, not by Black people, but by White people. Particularly young White people. Now, as you look at his events, they are becoming more heavily populated by Blacks. Not a bad thing -- but it does set the stage for a contest that is at least in part, a test of racial loyalty -- for boty Blacks and Whites, particularly White men, since White Democratic women are pretty much Hillary's to lose.
That, is a shame.
However, I predict that the Clintons, having made their point in South Carolina, will back off on the racial insurgency. They don't need it anymore. My opinion is that it was very deliberate, and designed to make the expected (even by them) Obama victory in South Carolina seem pyrrhic, setting the stage for them to argue that the REAL contests are the ones ahead.
Mission accomplished.
So what should the Obama campaign do now? Two words: win primaries. They will need a couple of big victories in states that don't have a 45-50% Black Democratic electorate, in order to slow the Clinton machine down.
Update: For what it's worth, Pat Buchanan agrees with me on this. I don't know if I'm comfortable with the consistent level of agreement between us over the last few years...
Update 2: The exit polls should be sobering for the Clintons. Barack won not only Black voters, but also churchgoers, younger voters, and late deciders. And the majority of those who said that Bill Clinton's rhetoric affected their vote said that they voted for Obama.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
