I don’t know who will win tonight’s primary in South Carolina. It looks good for Barack Obama but New Hampshire showed us that nothing is certain until the votes are counted. But, whatever happens, the Clintons have won the expectations game and they have succeeded in turning this into a racial contest. Just look at this Wall Street Journal headline: To Truly Win in Carolina, Obama Needs Large Margin. And what do you think of this?
Early on, the primary appeared likely to be an intriguing competition between an African American with broad appeal to white voters and a woman with strong ties to the black community.
Instead, what has developed is an electorate polarized along racial lines. An MSNBC-McClatchy newspapers poll this week showed Obama with 59 percent of the black vote and about 25 percent for Clinton. Among white voters, Obama’s support is barely in the double digits, with Edwards narrowly leading Clinton among the rest of the white community.
More than four in five African American voters said they have a favorable impression of Obama, but only about a third of white voters have a positive view of his candidacy. Big majorities of white voters give Clinton and Edwards positive marks, but fewer than half of blacks rated them positively.
I know some people have an issue or two with Barack Obama’s campaign (on the issues or his post-partisan tone) but it’s hard to figure out why someone would have negative view of his campaign, which has aspired to be relentlessly positive and hopeful. Yet, two-thirds of white South Carolinians express a negative opinion. This is an expression of the power of dog whistle politics, and these results show that the Clintons are masters of the genre. Ironically, injecting race into the contest has benefited Edwards as much or more than it has benefited Hillary. With any luck (and justice) Edwards will come in second place tonight and punish the Clintons for their heinous campaign tactics.
More likely, however, Hillary will come in a strong second and move quickly to dismiss the significance of the result. The media is already doing the job.
For Sen. Barack Obama, anything less than a decisive victory Saturday might lead some political operatives and observers to shrug off a first-place finish as a given…
…Even with a decisive victory in South Carolina, Mr. Obama could face new challenges. After nearly a year of avoiding the issue of race and running a campaign based on positive change, the Illinois senator has addressed the issue more directly in both his stump speeches and in TV ads that boast he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
Being seen through a racial lens may diminish his chances in other states, especially those with fewer black voters, says Julian Zelizer, a professor of contemporary American politics and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey. “Obama will need to regroup and think about his image leading into other primaries,” Mr. Zelizer says.
In the past week, Mr. Obama’s support among white Democrats fell in South Carolina to 10% from 20%, according to a McClatchy/MSNBC poll. Many of those voters switched their allegiance to South Carolina-born candidate John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator.
In this media narrative there is no possible result out of South Carolina that won’t benefit Clinton. If Obama doesn’t win by a huge margin, he loses. If his vote is heavily black, he loses. If the white vote rejects him, he loses. And, by the way, it’s his fault that racial divides have opened up because he had the gall to mention that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
With the deck this stacked against him, what hope is there than Obama can gain any momentum out of a victory tonight?
