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BILOXI, Mississippi: Barack Obama trounced Hillary
Clinton in Mississippi’s Democratic primary behind the huge
support from African Americans as a nasty new race row rocked their
White House battle.
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 Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro, who put
Obama’s 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 were African
Americans, nine in 10 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.
--AFP
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