December 23, 2007

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Columbia

You couldn’t blame Barack Obama for feeling all biblical on that second Sunday in December. There he was, emerging triumphantly from the same tunnel where the Gamecocks football team spills out on Saturdays, under the warm blue sky of an afternoon that felt miraculously like spring, amid the foot-stomps and hollered blessings of the biggest campaign crowd of the year, with Oprah Herself hallooing above the din, “Bar-ack O-bam-a! Bar-ack O-bam-a!” If the skies had suddenly cracked open above Williams-Brice Stadium and God’s voice boomed down “Vote for Barack” while a heavenly choir belted out “Oh Happy Day,” it would have seemed like just another part of the show. Right here in Obama’s must-win early primary state, where a new poll was showing him in a statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton. Right here with the very people–mostly African-Americans and mostly women–who have given the Man from Audacity the roughest going-over of his political life. And still are.

“I am so grateful to be here today,” Obama beamed, soaking up the adulation and sliding into dialect. “Givin’ all praise and honor to Gahd. Look at the day that the Lord has made. I would be blessed even if I was in Chicago, but I don’t mind being in seventy-degree weather.” As the 29,000 cheered, he cut in, chuckling his rich chuckle: “Michelle said, ‘Praise the Lawd!’ It’s been cooold up in Chicago!”

For most of 2007 Obama’s been feeling a chill down here, too. With African-Americans likely to make up a majority of primary voters on the Democratic side, South Carolina’s contest is as close to a “black primary” as we’re going to get in 2008–the only time in the entire campaign, almost certainly, when Democrats will be fighting all-out for African-American votes. Clinton’s support among African-Americans, largely thanks to her husband’s popularity, proved surprisingly strong at first, as did her smooth, state-of-the-art machine politics; as late as September, a CNN poll gave her a stunning 57 percent of the black vote here, to Obama’s paltry 33. That would deal a death blow to Obama’s chances, not only here but in the February 5 primaries, especially in Alabama and Georgia, where large numbers of black voters are weighing their choices–and watching South Carolina.