Clinton Strategy a Major Failure

In the first major test of Hillary Clinton's strength in a major southern primary, one thing has become clear. The Clinton strategy is a major failure.

Not only did Hillary lose, but she lost big. Senator Barack Obama won in a major landslide with 55% of the vote. Hillary finished a distant 2nd with 27%. And South Carolina native son John Edwards came in 3rd with 18% of the vote.

Clinton had a 3-pronged strategy going into the South Carolina primary. First, unleash husband Bill as an attack dog on Barack Obama. Second, attack Obama relentlessly during the pre-primary debate. Third, use the race card to subtly link Obama with the Black vote in order to scare older white voters into supporting Hillary.

The intended result of this strategy was to send some of Obama's support from white voters over to Hillary.

It did not work. Not only did it not work but it may have backfired.

Obama received a respectable showing of white support in the South Carolina primary. When the totals are fully tallied we will see that Obama received roughly 30-35% of the white vote. Hillary received roughly 45% of this vote. And John Edwards received roughly 15-20% of the white vote.

This means that Obama is poised to do very well with white voters on Super Tuesday--a fact that looms ominously over the heads of the Clintons who expected Obama to be another Jessie Jackson whose appeal is limited almost exclusively to black voters.

In fact, Bill Clinton said as much during remarks following Hillary's concession to Obama in South Carolina. The former President stated that Obama has run a good campaign, 'just like Jessie Jackson did in South Carolina in 1984 and 1988.'

The problem is that Jackson was not running against a former First Lady and her husband, a former President of the United States. In addition, Jackson got almost NONE of the white vote in those years.

Rush Limbaugh and Dick Morris have postulated a theory that the Clintons wanted to lose South Carolina so they could say afterward that they fully expected Obama to win 'because of the large African-American vote in the state,' and thus scare white people into the Clinton camp.

If, in fact, the Clinton strategy was to lose, once again the plan backfired. They wanted her to lose but not by 30 percentage points, which puts her entire campaign in trouble.

Exit polls in S.C. show that voters were turned off by the Clintons' playing the race card and conducting a highly negative campaign. Thus, the entire Clinton campaign strategy must be re-evaluated just a little over two weeks away from Super Tuesday.

And they surely did not want Obama picking up the level of support he received from white voters.

Obama now has big momentum going into Super Tuesday, and the Clintons are wondering what went wrong.