Webloggin » ‘Route’, ‘Substantial’, ‘Big Win’ - Obama Smashes the ‘Inevitable One’ in South Carolina

Barack Obama beat back Clinton Inc. with 55% of the vote to Clinton’s 27%, followed by John Edwards who could only manage to get 18% in his back yard. The biggest disappointment for Hillary Clinton came in the women vote category that made up 61% of the total voter base in this afternoons primary. In that demographic Barack Obama took in 54% of the vote to Clinton’s 30%.

Some will be tempted to write off Hillary Clinton’s loss to the black vote but it’s not that simple. That kind of talk was the pre-loss spin that the Clinton campaign dangled out there to minimize a loss that they and everyone else knew was coming. The reality however is much different than the spin. Black voters only made up 54% of the vote in South Carolina. A full 52% of the youth non-black in the 29 and under crowd voted for Barack Obama leaving Clinton and Edwards fighting for the rest.

Hillary Clinton had so much contempt for the voters in South Carolina that she wouldn’t even speak to supporters after the polls closed. This adds insult to injury for those who had held the Clintons up on a pedestal for so long.

The Clinton’s are still trying to distance themselves from having stirred the ugly specter of racism but it is clearly apparent that voters understood what the Clintons were doing all along. In fact the Clinton campaign is still doing it.

Clinton campaign strategists denied any intentional effort to stir the racial debate. But they said they believe the fallout has had the effect of branding Obama as “the black candidate,” a tag that could hurt him outside the South.

This is the kind of underhanded smear that actually drove liberal Democrats away from Clinton in the first place. The Clinton campaign is trying to scare white and Hispanic voters into coming out to vote against Obama using the assumption that whites and Hispanics are racist. Thus the Clintons have now managed to insult all races with their trite little campaign. Note how the following poll item translates.

Nearly six in 10 voters said the former president’s efforts for his wife was important to their choice, and among them, slightly more favored Obama than the former first lady.

Overall, Obama defeated Clinton among both men and women.

Worse for Clinton was the fact that only one in five said the war in Iraq was the most important issue in election. This means that Obama did not beat Hillary on her most vulnerable issue for hard core liberals; he beat her on issues and likability because she is not genuine and certainly not likable.

The exit polls showed the economy was the most important issue in the race. About one quarter picked health care. And only one in five said it was the war in Iraq, underscoring the extent to which the once-dominant issue has faded in the face of financial concerns.

Update: I’m not alone in this analysis.

Rich Lowry at National Review Online notes:

1) This is a thumping that far and away exceeds any Clintonian expectations-setting. It is a victory so big that there’s no explaining it away.

2) That won’t stop the Clintons from trying to explain it away on race, of course. But that’s harder when—according to the set of exits polls I’m looking at—she didn’t win the white vote herself, splitting it with Edwards, and Obama basically tied her among white males.

3) There obviously was distaste for the Clintons’ trashy tactics in South Carolina. She won only 21% of late-breaking whites, while Edwards won 52%. There has also been distaste about those tactics building among liberal opinion-makers. A key question is whether that feeling spreads out from South Carolina and down from the opinion elite. Have the Clintons damaged their brand nationally over the last couple of weeks?

Ed Morrissey at Captains Quarters:

That statistic strongly implies that Bill Clinton’s negativity made a difference, and that it turned off half of those affected by it to any significant degree. That should inform the Clinton campaign about what Bill’s role should be in the future.

CNN’s analysts point out another way to look at this election: 73% of South Carolina Democrats voted against Hillary.

Bill Clinton Changes Tune, sort of

Former President Bill Clinton, who has been campaigning on behalf of his wife, told a rally in Missouri that Mr Obama had “won fair and square”.

Huh? Why would there ever have been a presumption that the vote wasn’t fair? Oh, that’s right, Democrats that lose always assume cheating on the other side.

The Associated Press, always known for injecting their own special brand of idiocy into their reports, sees race as a key issue that catapulted Barack Obama to the top:

The audience chanted “Race doesn’t matter” as it awaited Obama to make his appearance after rolling up 55 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

But it did, in a primary that shattered turnout records.

About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama. Black women turned out in particularly large numbers. Obama, the first-term Illinois senator, got about a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina split the rest.

I’m sure that many black people voted for Obama because he has African American blood flowing through his veins. But how does that account for 25% of the white people voting for Obama in the South (a place that the MSM assumes is racist anyway)? In fact the press is diminishing those the South Carolina votes by putting it on race alone. In a primary that was nearly 50-50 between whites and blacks it is notable that Hillary was supported by 17% of the black vote while Barack Obama received about 25% of the white vote. That is only an 8% difference. Even if that Clinton gained that 8% of the vote she would have only gained a couple of points in the total primary turnout. This is negligible.

Race didn’t matter so much in the context that the press has put it. Race was an issue for those that held the Clinton’s in contempt for injecting race into the game. That is not racism, it is disgust. A sort of backlash against Bill and Hillary’s politics of personal destruction.