Advantage, Obama

The morning of the South Carolina primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton was making her final pitch to voters at a Shoney's restaurant in Columbia. Dressed in a black suit and accompanied by her daughter, Chelsea, Clinton slowly worked the remnants of the breakfast crowd, complimenting the strawberry pie, posing for cell-phone pictures and cooing over cute babies. The patrons appeared star-struck, and one waitress was so overwrought that she nervously fanned her face with her hand. One customer who seemed unimpressed, however, was Lillie James. A petite, elderly black woman with twinkling eyes, she stood with two friends in the reception area and declined to venture near all the fuss. Until a week ago, she was a Clinton supporter. But after watching the New York senator aggressively attack Obama at the Democratic debate on Monday, she became disenchanted. "It was out of bounds," said James, 72. "There was too much mud-slinging." So at 7 a.m. that morning, right when the polls opened, she cast her ballot instead for Sen. Barack Obama.

Apparently, plenty of other voters shared James's sentiment. Obama won the South Carolina primary decisively with about 55 percent of the vote, compared to about 27 percent for Clinton and about 18 percent for former Sen. John Edwards, on a day of record turnout. Obama overwhelmingly won the black vote—which accounted for about half of the electorate—capturing 81 percent, compared to 17 percent for Clinton, according to CNN exit polls. Obama won a sizeable chunk of the white vote, which went 39 percent for Edwards, 36 percent for Clinton and 24 percent for Obama. "The cynics who believed that what began in the snows of Iowa was just an illusion were told something different by the good people of South Carolina," Obama told jubilant supporters at a rally in Columbia after his victory. "We have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we've seen in a long time."

It's an impressive performance for the Illinois senator and precisely the sort of victory he needed after a difficult week in which he was frequently on the defensive against attacks by Clinton and her husband, the former president. Obama now enters the next stage of the nominating process—the buildup to Super Tuesday—with a jolt of new momentum. "This is a huge springboard into Feb. 5," says Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director. "You want a win going into the biggest Southern test so far, and we got it in a convincing way."

The results will likely reshape the debate over race in the contest. Though Democrats managed for much of the campaign to keep a lid on that sometimes incendiary topic, it spilled forth in the past few weeks, as the campaigns hurled accusations of racial divisiveness at each other. The Obama camp criticized comments that Clinton made about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while former President Bill Clinton seemed to belittle Obama in ways that many interpreted as racially tinged. South Carolina voters appeared to repudiate the nasty tone that the contest took on. "People wanted to make this simply about racial politics," says Gibbs. But "the people of South Carolina spoke out loudly tonight for a politics that brings us together to solve the problems that we face." Given Obama's solid performance among white voters, his campaign hopes to put to rest a question that was increasingly being raised: would he emerge from the South Carolina primary as "the black candidate" rather than a candidate who happened to be black? Obama supporters celebrating in Columbia offered their response with a chant repeated over and over: "Race doesn't matter!"

In the wake of the South Carolina contest, the Clinton campaign will likely have to re-examine the role of  Bill Clinton. In the past week, he played attack dog in a way that many party elders found reprehensible. Despite the criticisms, campaign advisers insisted that he was a net positive for his wife. He campaigned actively for her in the state's African-American community, which has always been a solid bastion of support for him. Yet he proved incapable of delivering his wife the black vote—and may even have alienated it. (Earlier in the week, Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle attributed Obama's growing black support to "pride" in him and "a sense of history.") A little more than an hour after the polls closed in South Carolina, the former president struck a conciliatory note before a crowd in Independence, Mo. Obama "won fair and square" in South Carolina, said Bill Clinton, then immediately questioned the vote's relevence.  "Now we go to Feb. 5, when millions of Americans get in the act." He also cited the work of his foundation, describing his "current capacity" as "post-politics."

The Clinton campaign sought to gain control of the news narrative before the polls even closed—and made it clear that they're willing to wager interparty warefare to win. Around noon on Saturday, Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director, sent out a memo heavy with spin. "Regardless of today's outcome," he wrote, "the race quickly shifts to Florida, where hundreds of thousands of Democrats will turn out to vote on Tuesday." Because Florida moved up its primary date to Jan. 29 in defiance of party rules, the Democratic National Committee voted to strip the state of its delegates. And after early-voting states protested, the Democratic presidential candidates pledged not to campaign there. Yet Floridians are nevertheless voting, and the polls show Clinton with a substantial lead. So on the eve of the South Carolina primary, she called for the delegates from Florida and Michigan—which was also penalized for moving up its primary, and which Clinton won on Jan. 15 as the only candidate on the ballot—to count at the national convention.