In S.C. primary, Clinton strategy foiled

Former president Bill Clinton's advocacy for his wife seemed to leave a sour taste in the mouths of South Carolina voters. They chose Barack Obama. (Brian Snyder and Chip East/Reuters File)

IRMO, S.C.
SUSAN KILBURN, a 53-year-old real estate office manager voted Republican in the last six presidential elections. She voted here at a park Saturday for Barack Obama, helping him run away with the South Carolina primary and fueling his hopes against Hillary Clinton in the 22-state Super Tuesday Feb. 5.

"I surprised myself," Kilburn said.

"I wasn't pleased with the Republican candidates and I wasn't really pleased with the Democrats, either.

"But his ads made him seem the most real. He came across as the person who has the best chance to bring people together. I didn't feel like Hillary could do that."

Betsy Petersen, a 40-year-old preschool teacher, voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, but for Republicans ever since. She, too voted for Obama.

"The conservative part of the Republican Party has taken over and we've lost our senses," Petersen said.

"They've lost sight of the poor and the economy. I really like how he (Obama) pulled himself up having a single mother. I feel like he will be more truly caring about people."

These were two white women in a middle-class town that is 75 percent white and 20 percent black.

An overwrought media speculated whether racial divides would cheapen a victory by the African-American Obama in a primary with a heavy black vote. Late polls showed Obama's white female support plummeting to as little as 8 percent.

The speculation was encouraged by yet more tasteless whining by former president Bill Clinton on behalf of Hillary.

The man who played the gender card in New Hampshire by complaining he could not make his wife "younger, taller, male," virtually said in South Carolina that he was also sorry he could not make her black.

Bill Clinton conveniently forgot how earlier South Carolina polls had Hillary, a white woman, with double-digit leads over Obama and possibly splitting the black female vote.

Bill said, "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."

In the end, Bill's campaigning helped to marginalize Hillary and to momentarily set aside the skepticism often directed at Obama's ability to form a multiracial, multigenerational coalition.

Obama beat Clinton in South Carolina by a 2-1 margin of 55 percent to 27 percent. Not only did Obama get 79 percent of the black female vote, he won 22 percent of white women, giving him 54 percent of women overall, compared with 30 percent for Clinton.

Obama claimed 50 percent of the white vote under the age of 30. While Obama's white female support was not as dramatic as in his Iowa victory, that was no small feat in a state where the Confederate flag remains a heated symbol.

In 1988, a New York Times/CBS poll found that African American candidate Jesse Jackson received only 7 percent of the white vote in the 14 southern and border states.

At Obama's victory rally in Columbia, the crowd chanted several times, "Race doesn't matter." In Irmo, as I interviewed a voter in the park's parking lot, an African-American man, 51-year-old Ron Bodrick, a beverage distributor, pulled up in his car, rolled down his window and said, "You tell them that we voted for Obama because he's qualified, not because he's black.

"After the stuff Bill pulled, I'd vote for [Republican Mike] Huckabee before I'd vote for Hillary."

In a Columbia restaurant, Melissa Dunn, 22, a white waitress and an Obama supporter, said, "There are a lot of times I am not proud to be a South Carolinian, but today I'm proud."

Dunn is soon headed to Uganda for the Peace Corps.

"I don't know where his hope and faith come from, but he makes you believe. I love him."

Back in Irmo, 36-year-old Gabrielle Barnes, a white mother of three, said it was hard as a woman not to vote for Clinton, especially having a daughter who can now dream of being president.

But she decided, "It's been Bush and Clinton for so long. She (Clinton) voted for the war. I feel like she would be Bush all over again."

White voters like 30-year-old Amy Mills, a mental health therapist, and her 28-year-old husband Jeff, a waterproofer, said they voted for Obama based on their positive impressions of his marriage.

Amy said, "With Hillary, you don't know if what you're seeing with her and Bill is real. He (Obama) feels more like a people person to me."

Brooklyn Henderson, a 19-year-old first-year biology major at the University of South Carolina, said, "I just spent $700 on books.

"I want the war in Iraq to end so we can start funding education. I definitely consider myself a feminist, but there's something about Obama that makes me feel like he's genuinely talking to me, myself."

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.