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By Evelina Shmukler
, Agence France-Presse
BILOXI, Mississippi: Barack Obama
trounced Hillary Clinton in Mississippi’s Democratic primary,
riding huge support from African Americans, as a nasty new race row
rocked their White House battle.
The racial slur was delivered by
Clinton-supporter Geraldine Ferraro, the woman who made history as
the Democrats’ 1984 vice presidential candidate. She said, “ If
Obama was a woman, he would not be in this position [of being a
frontrunner].”
That this and other racial rows
have erupted in the campaign is a sign that racism is still a
problem of American society.
The Illinois senator punched back
with his second win in a row since the former first lady’s
campaign-saving wins in Texas and Ohio last week, which halted his
own 12-contest win streak and extended their epic struggle.
Even as Mississippi voted, the
tone of the contest took another negative lurch, as the Obama camp
demanded the ouster of Geraldine Ferraro for putting his stunning
rise in big-time US politics down to his race.
With its 33 nominating delegates,
conservative, Deep South Mississippi, reliably Republican in general
elections, was the last showdown in the Democratic race before the
more significant Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
“We have had a terrific week,
we have won Wyoming, we have won Mississippi,” Obama told MSNBC
after his victory, and rapped Clinton over her 2002 Senate vote to
authorize war in Iraq, a conflict he opposed.
In a statement, he said people in
Mississippi joined “millions of Americans from every corner of the
country who have chosen to turn the page on the failed politics of
the past and embrace our movement for change.”
Mississippi did not change the
race, but allowed Obama to pad his lead in the race for nominating
delegates doled out after each state contest.
Clinton campaign manager Maggie
Williams congratulated Obama and looked forward to Pennsylvania and
beyond, but there was no direct comment from the candidate herself.
With 99 percent of precincts
reporting in Mississippi, Obama had won 61 percent of the vote
compared to 37 percent for Clinton.
Television exit polls showed a
large racial divide: half of the Democratic electorate was African
Americans, nine in ten of whom went for Obama, according to MSNBC
figures.
Fox News exit polls said white
men voted for Clinton 69 to 30 percent, and white women by 74
percent to 26 percent.
According to a tally by
RealClearPolitics.com, the Mississippi victory left Obama with 1,606
delegates compared to 1,484 for Clinton—both still well short of
the 2,025 necessary to clinch the party’s nomination.
The latest racially tinged row of
an increasingly ugly campaign raged after Ferraro told a California
newspaper: “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this
position.”
The first African-American with a
viable shot at the White House, Obama called the remarks “patently
absurd.”
“I don’t think that Geraldine
Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or the
Democratic Party,” he told Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning
Call.
His campaign clamored for
Ferraro’s head, noting the swift resignation of an Obama aide last
week after her remark that Clinton was a “monster.”
New York Senator Clinton said she
did “not agree” with the comments and found it “regrettable”
that supporters might resort to personal attacks, but did not cut
Ferraro loose from her finance committee.
“We ought to keep this focused
on the issues. That’s what this campaign should be about,” she
said in Pennsylvania.
In a second interview with the
Daily Breeze, which carried her original remarks, Ferraro escalated
the row.
“Any time anybody does anything
that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, let’s address
reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re
accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,” she said.
“Racism works in two different
directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m
white. How’s that?”
Even if Florida and Michigan
repeat their contests after having their delegates stripped for
holding their primaries early, neither candidate can cross the magic
threshold of 2,025 delegates.
So the nomination will likely
rest in the hands of nearly 800 “superdelegates,” Democratic
party officials now under enormous pressure from the two campaigns
to sway one way or another.
Republicans were also voting
Tuesday.
But as Senator John McCain has
already clinched enough delegates to be the party’s
standard-bearer in the November presidential election, there was
little question about the outcome. McCain had 79 percent of the vote
with 99 percent counted.
--AFP
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