Obama’s Hollow Victory

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3163

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3090. Such a defeat would normally be a crushing and perhaps fatal blow to a rival’s campaign. Bill and Hillary laughed it off.

Indeed, even before the voting had ended, Bill Clinton had tarnished and diminished Barack’s victory. Responding to an unrelated question, he volunteered that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice in the 1980s.

This is an Arkansan way of saying black candidates always do well when there is a large black bloc vote, as in the Deep South, but no one should take this seriously. By introducing Jackson and earlier saying the Palmetto State contest would be about gender and race, Clinton set the media to looking beyond Barack’s total vote to its racial composition.And, sure enough, when the final returns came in, Barack had won 78 percent of the black vote, and lost 76 percent of the white vote.

Thus, Barack’s victory instantly raised a question in the minds of pundits and politicians. Can Democrats nominate a black candidate who cannot win a fourth of the white vote in a landslide victory in a Democratic primary in South Carolina?

Would nominating such a candidate cede all 11 states of the Old Confederacy to the GOP and imperil Democratic candidates all the way down the ticket? In truth, it would.

The anger and bristling defiance of the Clintons in his victory speech suggests that Obama knows what has been done to him and is being done to him, and knows there is little he can do about it.

http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=928

2008-01-31