Obama's SC victory should not be spun as Clintons wish

By Mike DeVine
HinzSight Legal Editor

I predicted last summer, after seeing Barack Obama give a long speech, and when he trailed Hillary Clinton by over 20 points in the South Carolina polls, that he would win my native Palmetto State's primary.

He has now done so.

Jesse Jackson won the SC caucuses in 1984 and 1988 after all. [As a side note, yours truly, pre-2000 conservative epiphany, was a delegate for Jackson in those caucuses. Gamecock has traveled a long road to the right!] I was the only white delegate for Jackson from my precinct in Spartanburg County in 1984, and one of less than ten in the whole county in 1984 and 1988. Moreover, Jackson's "rainbow" coalition of delegates at the state convention was extremely lacking in non-white hues in both years.

Not so for Obama, the winner of the near all white Iowa caucuses. It will be Hillary's coalition that is mostly monochrome this year.

So I have to strongly disagree with the spin I am watching on the MSM, that Obama's "mere" 25% of the white vote in today's SC primary makes him a "black" candidate only now, as opposed to being a candidate that happened to be Black yesterday.

An even split of the white vote would give a candidate 33%. By my math, twenty-five percent is only seven percent less, the margin of error in some polls!

I know that the Clinton Machine's plan was to make the spin that Barack only appeals to Blacks, coming out of SC, but with Obama getting 1 of 4, and Hilary and SC native John Edwards getting only 1 and 1/2 of 4 whites, I would suggest that the schizophrenic Clinton strategy did not produce the numbers they thought necessary to justify such a spin.

Obama has at least quadrupled the portion of the white vote Jackson received in the 80s, and garnered at least ten-fold more votes than Al Sharpton did in his efforts in SC.

The Clintons, as predicted by Dick Morris, and documented by my Will voluntary servitude of Black Dems survive public humiliation at Hillary’s hands? and The Audacity of Hope-dashing Democratic Party racism raged a virtual race "war" against the fellow Democrat as opposed to the typical race "cards" regularly dealt via the MSM against Republicans.

At first they were going to cede the state with virtually no effort by the candidate. Then they decided that they could best metamorphasize the non-racial Barack into, as one liberal pundit described, a "pet negro" that couldn't win in the general, by having Bill Clinton campaign 24/7 and have Hillary speak twice, so as to be seen as trying hard to win, only to lose due to racist whites and blacks. Not only painting SC democrats as racist, but inferring that Democrats and Americans generally are racists.

Of course they always call us in the GOP racists, with no proof. But what the Clintons' obsessive ambition brought into the open was evidence of the rabid racism that rules in the Democratic Party, a racism that I have bemoaned for 10 years, and which led me to the GOP.

Great damage has been done to the Democratic Party, and we should all (if religious) get on our knees and thank God for it. The damage is so great, because Blacks have seen the Clinton's play the game many of their own Black leaders regularly have played with the Clinton's against Republican whites.

That's why SC's James Clyburn, the US House Majority Leader, nearly endorsed Obama.

The message was clear.

All the race talk has obscured some other major facts:

1 - SC blacks didn't turn their support to Obama until AFTER they were shown he could win white votes in Iowa.

2 - Obama, unlike Jackson, has a chance to win, and provides many reasons other than melanin and genitalia to back him over Hillary.

3 - Bill Clinton has been on fire in SC with substantive arguments for Hillary 24/7, yet Obama still got 25% of the white vote.

Local TV and talk radio (as well as national talk radio) has been filled with reports of blacks that are alienated from the Clinton Dem Party. Many say they would stay home if Obama is destroyed, but many also say they would consider the GOP in the Fall. [Many, but not all, couple that possibility with a McCain or a Huckabee being on the GOP ticket.]

Obama has not responded well to the attacks, but
the fact is that the Dems are damaged more than Obama. The GOP needs to take heed of the events in Dixie today.

They must overtly go after Black voters. They should highlight Obama's "community organizing" activities (a staple from the democratic party anger/grievance ginning up playbook) as a young lawyer, a subject too taboo to speak of in public that Bob Johnson, in "Uncle Bill" (as dubbed by Rush Limbaugh to highlight the absurd Dem lable of "Uncle Tom" that liberals ascribe to black conservatives) mode, inadvertently mentioned when called on for an oblique reference to Obama's admitted youthful drug use.

But mostly, they need to highlight and demand scrutiny of states' motor-votor rolls and the voter ID issue. If the Democrats are writing off Blacks, their only chance to win in November is with dead or illegal voters.

That the GOP has not made a stink over this since Hillary's NY-Spitzer drivers' licenses gaffe, is an example of why we aren't in control of Congress.

Dems can't win majorities when only legal citizens vote. Why else do they cry racism against laws that require a voter to provide a photo ID?

It's obvious.

And post-SC, the Donkeys are even more dependent on voters that dare not be photographed. The GOP must not let the Dems make jack asses of them by being outlawyered. We should be about purging motor-voter rolls of illegals, not to mention, the dead, NOW.

Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
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