Race goes national after Obama's big South Carolina win
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (AFP) — White House hopeful Barack Obama took his message of unity on the road Sunday one day after trouncing rival Hillary Clinton in a race-tinged battle in South Carolina's Democratic primary.
The African-American senator from Illinois said his two-to-one margin over Clinton in Saturday's contest in the heavily black southern state demonstrated that Americans want to transcend racial and partisan divisions.
"I think people want change. I think they want to get beyond some of the racial politics that, you know, has been so dominant in the past," he said on ABC television.
After a tense battle splashed with accusations of "race-baiting," Obama swept the field with 55 percent of the vote against Clinton's 27 percent and ex-senator John Edwards' 18 percent.
New York Senator Clinton meanwhile defended her husband Bill, whose avid campaigning was blamed for racial polarization and, in some post-vote analyses, for her poor showing.
"Maybe he got a little carried away," Clinton said of the former president. "It also comes with sleep deprivation which, you know, I think is marking all of us, our families, our supporters," she told CBS.
Although exit polls showed a clear slant among white voters for Clinton and Edwards, Obama said his victory showed that people rejected the nasty politics of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president.
"In the '90s, we got caught up in a slash and burn politics that the American people are weary of," Obama said.
Obama's remarks came as the close-fought campaign looked toward the vast "Super Tuesday" vote of February 5, when more than 20 states vote in both Democratic and Republican primaries, and which could determine the candidates for the November 4 presidential election.
While Obama was in Georgia Sunday, Clinton moved to Tennessee where she addressed a black church congregation. Both have two state nominating contests under their belts, all in states with small numbers of delegates to the party's Denver national nominating convention.
Clinton then headed to Florida where her campaign expects to get a spurt of news coverage from an expected victory which could diminish Obama's momentum and give her a jolt going into Super Tuesday.
Obama could have a challenge winning solid support from Hispanic voters there, some analysts believe. "The Hispanic voter ... has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates," analyst Sergio Bendixen told The New Yorker.
But Senator Ted Kennedy, dean of the Democratic Party's liberal wing, was to give Obama's bid a major boost with his formal endorsement on Monday, sources close to the campaign said.
Kennedy was to make his announcement at a rally at Washington's American University, accompanied by his niece Caroline Kennedy, the sole surviving child of John F. Kennedy.
"Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves ... and imagine that together we can do great things," Caroline wrote of Obama in Sunday's New York Times, under the headline "A President Like my Father."
In the race for the Republican nomination tensions rose ahead of the Florida's primary Tuesday, in which Senator John McCain is closely matched with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Romney lashed out Sunday over McCain's accusation that he had advocated a pullout from Iraq "similar to what the Democrats are seeking, which would have led to the victory by Al-Qaeda."
"Everybody who's looked at what he said has found it to be completely misleading and inaccurate. It's dishonest," said Romney, seeking to burnish his national security credentials in front of Florida's conservatives.
Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani, the former national Republican front-runner who has pinned his campaign on a Florida victory, saw his hopes sink further when a new poll showed him running fourth in the state.
A Zogby poll Sunday put McCain and Romney tied at 30 percent, Mike Huckabee at 14 percent and Giuliani at 13 percent.
