Obama Wins Big!

The results are in, and Barack Obama won the Democrat South Carolina primary, bringing in 55% of the votes in a 3-way race.

Obama is still trying to keep race out of the race:

"The choice in this election is not about regions or religions or genders," Obama said at a boisterous victory rally. "It's not about rich versus poor, young versus old and it's not about black versus white. It's about the past versus the future."

As predicted, the Clinton camp is implying that Obama won easily because of race. What is a bit of a surprise is that the Clintons are saying it themselves:

"They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender. That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here," former president [Bill Clinton] said at one stop as he campaigned for his wife, strongly suggesting that blacks would not support a white alternative to Obama.

Nearly six in 10 voters said the former president's efforts for his wife was important to their choice, which reflects many pundits' predictions that Bill Clinton was deliberately being the lightning rod to keep Hillary out of the forefront.

This may seem like an odd strategy, but it's exactly what they did in 1992 (but with the roles reversed), and the past year has shown a consistent pattern of Hillary's poll numbers going down when she takes the center stage.

It should be fun to watch the whirling vortex of spin that is about to ensue after this huge win by Obama. And, it will also be interesting to watch how the race card is played - will Rush Limbaugh and many other conservative pundits be right? Will the Clintons play the card subtly but mercilessly to try to scare up the white vote for themselves?

We'll see...

There's my two cents.