Obama Wins a `Victory' In South Carolina - And Hillary Wins A Real One

Barack Obama won the Democrat South Carolina primary yesterday, based on sheer numbers..but the real winner was Hillary Clinton.

The key was in the exit poll data

54.5% of the turn out for the South Carolina primary consisted of black voters, as opposed to about 45.5 for non-blacks. Obama won the black votes in South Carolina by a whopping majority, around 80%.

The key, however is in the non-black vote. Obama beat Clinton and Edward's combined numbers by a couple of points in just one category of non-black voters, the 18-29 age group...and they were only 5% of the turnout. In every other non-black age group, the numbers were as lopsided against Obama as the numbers for black voters were in favor of Obama.

Translation? The Clintons have been successful in painting Obama as `the black candidate' and can expect to harvest the backlash, especially among Hispanic voters. With John Edwards finishing a distant third in a state he was born in and was well known in, he's a pretty safe bet to drop out soon...which means that Hillary Clinton will have the non-black vote pretty much to herself.

Obama may win his home state of Illinois, and he will garner a few delegates in Southern states with large black electorates, but when delegates are apportioned and the hammer comes down, it looks like Senator Clinton as the Democrat nominee this year. And in the general election, she's calculating (probably correctly) on those black votes having nowhere to go but to the Democrats anyway.

UPDATE: Apparently Teddy Kennedy has joined John Kerry and endorsed Obama for president, another chapter in the psychodrama between the Kennedy and Clinton wings of the party. And the New York Times even dragged Caroline Kennedy out of the woodwork...