Winning Large

by digby

Congratulations to Senator Obama! He has won South Carolina in a landslide and with 24% of white voters to boot. I think that should put to rest the idea that he has somehow become the “black” candidate and can’t compete. The Democrats aren’t going to win South Carolina in the general — it’s the most conservative state in the country — so this showing is meaningful.

It looks like Clinton came in far behind, although CNN is reporting that about 34% of her coalition was African American, which is a small bit of good news for her. Edwards’ voters were, perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly all white, with the majority being white males. (This is South Carolina, after all.)

So, this ugly race is over and it looks like all the racial talk was overblown and overplayed. The voters, once again, made their voices heard and the politicians will have to heed them.

I would hope that the media will take a little breather as well. Watching the concern trolling about Democratic racial divisiveness among people like Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough and Bill Bennett is enough to make me sick and should give progressives pause. As I wrote last night, I don’t think this helps Senator Obama any more than it helps Clinton.

It would be really nice if the media, both liberal and otherwise, would calm the hell down. They’ve been out of their minds since Iowa with the identity politics, pushing both the gender and the racial angles beyond all measure. But the fact is that this is much more complicated than they are letting on with lots of demographic information that they are ignoring. Obama, for instance, once again did extremely well among young people of all races, which it seems to me is much more salient than the media have yet to acknowledge. If he keeps this up, we will see an entire generation making its home in the Democratic Party and that is a tremendous advantage.

This is a great win for Barack Obama, and I’m genuinely thrilled that he was able to win a bi-racial majority in a three person field. It’s a nice bounce going into Super Tuesday, where, hopefully it will be so complicated for the press that they will actually be forced to report on the campaign instead of pontificating at length about things that are going to screw us in November no matter who ultimately wins.

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