By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 27, 2008

Across South Carolina last week, African American voters came in droves to see Sen. Barack Obama. They came, they said in interviews, not just for a glimpse of the first black candidate with a serious chance at winning the White House but because they were drawn by his message of bringing Americans of all backgrounds together.

"He speaks of things that touch the heart of everyday people. We all collectively as a society have to hold onto our hope together," said Beverly Newsome, a teacher in North Charleston. "How else are we going to make it if we don't join together to create a better society for everyone?"

Obama rode this surge of excitement for all it was worth, badly needing a big win after losses in New Hampshire and Nevada. In crowded high school gyms in impoverished towns, the senator from Illinois made few direct mentions of the historic nature of his candidacy but subtly encouraged voters not to give in to self-doubt. ("Don't let people make you afraid," he said in Kingstree.) He emphasized themes of interest to black voters -- his church-going, the high numbers of young blacks in prison. And he built a rapport with his jubilant, boisterous audiences unlike anything he had enjoyed elsewhere, parrying shouted remarks from the crowd and dropping into the vernacular with just enough irony to avoid accusations of pandering.

"I need your Cousin Pookie to vote!" he'd say with a smile, in a plea for a big turnout.

Voters loved it. After a rally in Kingstree on Thursday, Harrison McKnight, the county coroner, said the only thing that came close to it was when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the town for a speech at the high school football field in 1966. "It's wonderful. It's something new that wasn't here before," McKnight said.

There was an irony in this: By attracting African Americans with his message of unity, Obama was at risk of allowing the opposition to cast him in narrower terms than he would like.

The campaign of his chief opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), was preparing to discount an Obama victory in South Carolina as the predictable result of black voters' support for a fellow African American. In Charleston last week, Bill Clinton said, "They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender, and that's why people tell me that Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here." Yesterday, he noted that Jesse Jackson had twice won the state's Democratic primary.

And pre-election polls showing a drop in support for Obama among white voters in South Carolina, alongside a surge in black support, threatened to undercut one of his main themes: that he can transcend the nation's divisions.

With yesterday's resounding victory, Obama may have dodged that threat, emerging from a hard-fought primary with his message of conciliation and his strategy of cross-demographic appeal intact, even as he faces considerable challenges leading up to the crush of 22 states voting a week from Tuesday. He won with 55 percent of the vote, double Clinton's share, and was carried by overwhelming support from black voters, who made up more than half of the electorate and voted for Obama 4 to 1 over Clinton, according to exit polls.

He received proportionately far less support from white voters -- about a quarter voted for him, with the remainder splitting about evenly between Clinton and former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Yet Obama's support among whites was higher than had been predicted by several polls last week -- he won nearly as many white men as Clinton -- allowing his campaign to argue that his message of national conciliation had a broader reach than many expected in a state with a complex racial history.

"Race doesn't matter!" the crowd at Obama's victory celebration in Columbia chanted last night, and when he spoke, the senator elaborated on the theme. He said his victory disproved those who argue that people "think, act and even vote within the categories that supposedly define us" -- that blacks will not vote for a white candidate and vice versa.

"I did not travel around this state and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina," he said. The election, he said, "is not about rich versus poor or young versus old, and it's not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future."

The campaign now moves forward with a clear set of assets and disadvantages heading into Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, when millions of voters will go to the polls in California, New York, Illinois and 21 other states.

Obama has, it appears, secured a solid base among African Americans, despite the fondness that many black voters had for Bill Clinton, and despite early uncertainty among many African Americans about whether Obama was a viable candidate or whether they could identify with the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother. He will count on this base to deliver strong showings in the four Southern states that vote on Feb. 5 -- he headed last night to Macon, Ga., and today will visit Birmingham, Ala. -- as well as to help him compete in big states such as California, New York and New Jersey.

At the same time, though, Obama will strive to prove in states such as Kansas, Colorado and North Dakota that he continues to hold appeal for white voters in "red state" areas, such as rural Iowa, where he ran close to even with Clinton and Edwards, and rural Nevada, where he outperformed Clinton. And he will try to cut into Clinton's large advantage among Hispanic voters, which advisers in both campaigns agree is due partly to historic tensions between blacks and Hispanics.

The main challenge will be time: Obama was able to win such broad support in Iowa after months of campaigning there, and he won backing from Hispanic voters in Illinois after similarly lengthy exposure. That will not be possible in the next 10 days. "One of the advantages we had in Iowa was that we had enormous time for people to become familiar with me," Obama said at a news conference last week. "We're going to have to translate those favorable impressions into a much more compressed political schedule. That's a challenge we hope to meet."

For now, Obama supporters in South Carolina are relieved that he was able to achieve a victory of such proportions that it will be hard for the opposition to play it down. Many supporters were dismayed that there was even a chance that a win could be discounted on the basis of his strong backing from black voters. They noted that Obama had to work hard to win those voters, many of whom were backing Clinton only a few months ago, and that the surge in turnout was not simply a matter of identity politics, but also the result of a strong grass-roots organization.

As for Obama's weaker performance among white voters in the state, his supporters argued that this overlooked the presence of Edwards, who was born in South Carolina and who captured 40 percent of white voters but drew virtually no support among blacks.

For the Clinton campaign to try to "translate an Obama victory into a defeat, that's absurd," Joe Kelly, an English professor at the College of Charleston, said yesterday. "It really bothers me that they would do that."

The large margin of victory gave heart to those such as Mary Baise, a telecommunications saleswoman in Beaufort who hoped that the results would not be interpreted in demographic breakdowns alone.

"I hope people see that African Americans are standing beside him for who he is, not because he's African American," she said after a rally on Thursday. "I'm hoping they'll see things other than color."