By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Barack Obama cruised to a crucial victory over former first lady Hillary Clinton in a bitterly contested Democratic primary in South Carolina, giving a boost to his campaign to become America’s first black president.
Obama’s return to the front after two consecutive losses, in New Hampshire and Nevada, brought him back into reckoning ahead of the coast-to-coast Feb 5 “Super Tuesday” battle when both Democratic and Republican parties hold nomination contests in 22 of 50 US states.
With most results in Obama garnered 55 percent of the vote, more than double that of Clinton, who shed her aura of “inevitability” with a surprise loss to Obama in the opening caucuses in Iowa Jan 3. John Edwards, the party’s 2004 vice presidential nominee who was born in South Carolina, finished third with 18 percent vote.
There are those who doubted this country’s desire for something new,” Obama said to a cheering crowd in Columbia chanting “Yes, we can” and “We are change”.
“The choice in this election is not about regions or religions or genders,” he said. “It’s not about rich versus poor, young versus old and it’s not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future.”
Addressing the racial divisiveness and personal attacks of the primary, Obama acknowledged his South Carolina victory came with some difficulties and that the road ahead will be just as hard.
“We are up against forces that prevent us from being who we want to be,” he said. “We are up against the idea that it’s OK to say anything and do anything to win an election.”
With former president Bill Clinton, who has wide appeal among black voters, campaigning aggressively on his wife’s behalf and challenging Obama’s record the two candidates brawled repeatedly over race and their records. So much so that as the bitter fight turned personal between Obama and Hillary Clinton and assumed racial overtones with issues taking a back seat, Edwards dubbed himself the “grown-up” candidate in the race.
About half the voters were black, according to media interviews with voters as they left polling places, and four out of five of them chose Obama. Black women voted in large numbers. By contrast, Obama got a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.
At stake in South Carolina were 54 delegates to be distributed among the three in proportion to their vote. To win the party’s nomination one needs 2026 of 4050 elected in primaries and caucuses all over the US.
Obama now has “momentum” said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “It leads a lot of Democrats to look at him again as a presidential nominee.”
Clinton called Obama to congratulate him and headed from South Carolina to Tennessee, a Feb 5 state, as the results began to roll in. “We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the 22 states as well as American Samoa who will vote on Feb 5th,” Clinton said in a statement.
After a contentious Democratic debate Monday night, three in four Obama voters said Clinton had attacked Obama unfairly and slightly fewer than half accused Obama of attacking Clinton unfairly. Two-thirds of Clinton voters said Obama attacked her unfairly and nearly as many said she attacked him unfairly.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, told CNN that the Democratic Party and its presidential field have to put the subject of race behind them.
“Everybody just ought to chill and put these issues behind us,” said Clyburn, who is neutral in the race. “All three candidates leave South Carolina with a ticket to the Democratic convention. …Not all of them have first-class tickets, but they can be upgraded.”
Media interviews with voters as they left polling places indicate pocketbook issues were key. Given three choices, half the voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country.
Race clearly outweighed gender. Obama defeated Clinton among both women and men, winning just more than half the support of each gender. Clinton won only about three in 10 women overall.
But the gender breakdown was racially tinged. Clinton got four in 10 white females, compared with a third for Edwards and one in five for Obama. Edwards won about four in 10 white males, while Clinton and Obama each won about three in 10.
Critics accused Bill Clinton, who won South Carolina in his 1992 White House run, of injecting race into the contest through a series of veiled remarks. Clinton angrily denied the assertion, and at one point even snapped at the media.
Democrats, independents and Republicans were allowed to vote in South Carolina’s open primary, provided they didn’t vote last week in the Republican primary, won by Arizona Senator John McCain.