Obama Win in South Carolina May Be Critical

In a rousing, pitch-perfect victory speech tonight, Barack Obama appeared every bit the transformative, promising new candidate for president that has been the message of his campaign since its inception.

Contrasting with an increasingly negative tone from the Clinton campaign, Obama said of his opponents that they are “fierce competitors who are worthy of our respect and admiration …”

Obama's overwhelming win in South Carolina may prove pivotal, not because of the voters' apparent rejection of weeks of snide comments from the Clinton campaign in an apparent effort to brand Obama as an unreliable and untested stranger in America, or even the embrace of Obama's message, but because of Bill Clinton's shocking dismissal of the significance of South Carolina's black vote propelling Obama to victory.

Said Clinton of Obama's win in response to a question that Obama faces two Clintons as Democratic primary opponents: “That’s just bait, too. Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama's run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.”

The significance of Clinton's remark is that Clinton diminished Obama's win by pointing out that another black man, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, won South Carolina twice, suggestive that it's no big deal another black man would win there.

This explicit attitude of failing to acknowledge Obama's character and positive qualities will feed into an existing political matrix of the Clinton campaign as ungracious and disrespectful, a dynamic that has already seen Hillary Clinton's lead over Obama among blacks evaporate.

In other developments, Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama today in a New York Times op-ed entitled, "A President Like My Father".

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