HOW CLINTON WILL WIN THE NOMINATION BY LOSING SOUTH CAROLINA
By Dick Morris
TheHill
Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination.
The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina's Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large.
They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. -- an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.
By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama's, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.
Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle.
Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he's going to lose?
Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama's ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight.
It's one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1.
But most people don't read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race -- and Obama ultimately loses.
The rest is here.. http://thehill.com/dick-morris/how-clinton-will-win-the-nomination-by-losing-s.c.-2008-01-23.htmlI don't have to go into detail on who Dick Morris is and why he knows the Clintons so well. If you don't know, then you don't belong on MyDD. :-)
It's important to note that he wrote this article BEFORE the SC primary, but it's almost prophetic. Say what you want about Obama, but he tried his best to keep race out of the election. But yet, after the spanking last night, Bill compares his Baracks' success to Jesse Jackson, another politician whom Obama has nothing in common with except both are Black and live in Chicago. But Bill is introducing the same type of politics ("The Southern Strategy") that the Republicans use to win elections. Minimize the threatening Democratic candidate by reducing him to his race, so that white America will think he's not mainstream.
Except that this is a primary, and this tactic will bite the Democratic Party in the ass come November.
How do the Clintons expect to win in November, if they marginalize Obama's victories, by marginalizing his voters? Barack performed well in Iowa, NH and NV, yet the CLinton strategy is to say he won't do well in states with a low Black population.
And the numbers game that I see on MYDD...Barack got 26% of the white vote in South Carolina. Considering that there were two other white candidates (if you want to go down the asinine path of thinking that whites always only vote for white candidates) he slightly underperformed by 7% on an expected return of 33%. Not that bad. What makes this brilliant is that one of the candidates was born in the state, and the other was the most recognized Democrat in the country.
Mathematically speaking , anytime a candidate gets 80% of a group , that will skew the percentages of his/her coalition of voters.His white support isn't shrinking, his Black base is just growing..... I can assure you that Edwards and Hillary will NOT get almost 40% of the white vote in a state that has a low Black population, as long as Obama is running......
The White vote is an integral part of Barack's campaign and his vision for America. He has been about unity from day one. There wasn't much that he told the African-Americans in South Carolina, that he didn't tell the poor, white farmers in Iowa. Being Poor or underinsured or undereducated is the same in ANY state. Anybody in Iowa, Nevada and NH will tell you that. That's how he did so well there and will do well elsewhere.
It's just that Blacks are finally starting to believe in his vision for America too, and they shouldn't be penalized for it.
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