The Clinton campaign has never looked as hard into the future -- or the past -- as it did last night. Hillary had already left South Carolina for Tennessee, and Bill was giving a semi-concession speech from Missouri, looking forward to the millions of people who will be voting on Super Tuesday -- since the hundreds of thousands in South Carolina didn't exactly go the way the Clintons had hoped. And he desperately tried to spin Obama's triumph away by telling reporters that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in 1984 and 1988. But however hard the Clintons are trying to look forward to our Super Tuesday future or drag us into the Jesse Jackson past, there are some stunning numbers in the present they have to deal with: Obama got 295,091 votes to Clinton's 141,128 (more than twice as many). He got more votes than John McCain and Mike Huckabee(279,723). He won 78% of the black vote, 25% of the white vote, and 52% of the non-black vote under 30. And he was more than a little responsible for the fact that Democratic turnout was twice that of 2004 (532,000 to 280,000). These numbers are pretty hard to run away from.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The Clinton campaign has never looked as hard into the future -- or the past -- as it did last night. Hillary had already left South Carolina for Tennessee, and Bill was giving a semi-concession speech from Missouri, looking forward to the millions of people who will be voting on Super Tuesday -- since the hundreds of thousands in South Carolina didn't exactly go the way the Clintons had hoped. And he desperately tried to spin Obama's triumph away by telling reporters that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in 1984 and 1988. But however hard the Clintons are trying to look forward to our Super Tuesday future or drag us into the Jesse Jackson past, there are some stunning numbers in the present they have to deal with: Obama got 295,091 votes to Clinton's 141,128 (more than twice as many). He got more votes than John McCain and Mike Huckabee combined (279,723). He won 78% of the black vote, 25% of the white vote, and 52% of the non-black vote under 30. And he was more than a little responsible for the fact that Democratic turnout was twice that of 2004 (532,000 to 280,000). These numbers are pretty hard to run away from.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot