ComeBarack Obama
It’s about 4:30am here in Madrid, and I just got home. I hesitated before looking at the news, afraid I might ruin my good mood. When I saw the results of the primary….
I could pretend I’m indifferent. This is, after all, supposed to be a moderate site, and I do try to keep myself reasonable. Sadly, that’s not to be tonight. I’m thrilled by the results. I’m also surprised. Obama didn’t just win, he won by a HUGE margin. He got over DOUBLE the votes Clinton did. Clinton was actually closer in numbers to Edwards than Obama.
It’s no secret that I prefer Obama to Clinton. I think that now I understand a bit better why so many Republicans dislike the Clintons; the naked, unadulterated ambition to the exclusion of all other things, unity of the party included is frightening to watch. If you add not agreeing with their policy positions (which I do, most of the time) I can easily see why they are so disliked in conservative circles.
Of course the picking apart of who voted for which candidate has already started in full force. Though the margin of Obama’s victory is huge, big enough to assume that he could have still won without a disproportionately large black vote, I fully expect the Clinton camp to insinuate that he’s the “black candidate”. Hillary won’t of course, that’s the job left to Bill and to the black surrogates they have (who can safely make race an issue without being called racists). How much was it a factor? This early it actually seems rather mixed. On the one hand we have this from Fox:
early exit polls show that Obama received a whopping 80% of the African American vote and 24% of the caucasian vote as compared to Hillary Clinton and John Edwards’ 38% each.
But on the other hand you can read this on the New York Times:
He also has bragging rights about a new coalition of support: About as many South Carolina white men voted for Mr. Obama as voted for Mrs. Clinton, and 70 percent of white voters said they would be satisfied if Mr. Obama won the Democratic nomination, according to exit polls was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and the Associated Press.
Of course painting Obama just as the black candidate is a little absurd considering he won a state with a whopping 2.5% African American population, but hey, there are facts and then their are elections, after all.
Finally, there’s a lot of speculation about the future of Edwards. He’s won zero states, including SC, which he won in ‘04. I’m going to go along with the growing conventional wisdom here and guess he’ll make it all the way to super-Tuesday and then, if neither candidate gets a majority, use his delegates at the convention to negotiate, possibly a good position in the future administration.
"I think that now I understand a bit better why so many Republicans dislike the Clintons; the naked, unadulterated ambition to the exclusion of all other things, unity of the party included is frightening to watch. If you add not agreeing with their policy positions (which I do, most of the time) I can easily see why they are so disliked in conservative circles."
A lot of Democrats are saying this now. For conservatives, there is more than a little happy schadenfreude about this. It’s like welcoming the formerly blind and deaf into the world of sight and sound.
"I fully expect the Clinton camp to insinuate that he’s the “black candidate”. Hillary won’t of course, that’s the job left to Bill and to the black surrogates they have (who can safely make race an issue without being called racists)."
Actually, Bill has already been saying this for several days….