Again, the crowd cracked up. Obama didn’t have to say anything malicious about Clinton; making her seem ridiculous was good enough.
The next morning, I walked up Gervais Street to the state capitol to catch Obama at the NAACP’s “King Day At The Dome” rally. It was an angry gathering, a complete contrast from the night before. The NAACP has been boycotting the state for years over the decision to relocate the Confederate battle flag from the top of the capitol dome to a more prominent site in front of the building. Speakers railed against the state of South Carolina. Even the invocation was the most political I have ever heard.
”Our nation has gone mad with the fever of war,” Dr. Neal Jones, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Columbia, prayed. “We traded our precious civil liberties for the illusion of security.” Just for good measure, Jones informed God that “our government has been sold to the highest bidders to give tax cuts to the rich.”
The rally was attended by Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. They were supposed to begin with a march from Zion Baptist Church to the capitol grounds. But Hillary Clinton’s plane was late, and Edwards was nowhere to be seen among the marchers. So Obama was in the middle of the throng, walking among clearly adoring fans toward the capitol.
When he got there, the event — which was supposed to be for all the candidates, and not favor any particular candidacy — was clearly Obama’s for the taking. There was simply no doubt which candidate most of the speakers favored. Dr. Lonnie Randolph, head of the South Carolina state NAACP, pointed to a statue of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the white supremacist governor and U.S. senator, near the Confederate flag. (The inscription at the base of the Tillman statue says, “This monument erected by the legislature, the Democratic Party, and private Citizens of South Carolina.”) Look at that statue and go vote on Saturday, Randolph told the crowd. “The same hands that used to pick cotton in South Carolina will have the opportunity to pick the next president of the United States,” he said. “If you do what you’re supposed to do on the 26
th, bigots like Ben Tillman will turn over in their graves.”
Obama spoke first and delivered a short version of the “moral deficit” speech he gave Sunday morning at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. It wasn’t nearly as electrifying as his performance at the convention center the night before, but the crowd was all cheers. Obama was followed by Edwards, who was politely received, sort of. When Edwards concluded with “God bless you all,” a man behind me responded, “God bless you, brother!” The man waited just a moment and yelled, “OBAMA!”
Clinton spoke last, and she was able to turn a noisy crowd that just a few minutes earlier had been cheering wildly — responding to Obama with cries of “That’s right!” and “Tell it!” — into a quiet gathering. Nobody booed what she had to say, but there wasn’t much cheering either. As she neared the end of her remarks, Randolph, the timekeeper, inched closer to her, theatrically checking his watch once, then twice, then three times.
South Carolina is the first state in which African Americans, a huge part of the Democratic constituency, will have a chance to vote in big numbers, and they are likely to give Obama his first win since Iowa. After that, who knows? Watching Obama perform at the convention center Sunday night, it’s easy to understand why Bill Clinton is walking around with a look of red-faced frustration these days. Obama represents a mortal threat to his wife’s candidacy, and, given the identity politics that prevail in the Democratic Party, it will be hard to cut his legs out from under him without appearing racist. But there’s no doubt that some Republicans are hoping the Clintons will succeed. Running against the man on stage at the convention center would be a hard, hard campaign, requiring a very big boat.
— Byron York is the NR White House correspondent.
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