SECOND EVENING UPDATE - JANUARY 19, 2008

We're updating at 9:31 p.m. EST.  Fox has just called South Carolina for McCain.  Huckabee is close, but the fact remains that he did not win in a deep South state with a strong evangelical base.  His support up north is weak.  He may turn out to be the flavor of the month.  By contrast, McCain is gaining strength, not losing it.  Politics is a numbers game.

Looking again at the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, won by Hillary Clinton, we can ask if there was a master stroke in this campaign.  Yes, in my view there was.  It was the moment Bill Clinton called in to Al Sharpton's radio show to "explain" his wife's statement that Dr.  Martin Luther King Jr. needed Lyndon Johnson to pass civil rights legislation in 1964.  Bill Clinton's call was portrayed by big media as "damage control," since some black leaders had charged Hillary Clinton with demeaning Dr. King.

Rubbish.  It wasn't damage control at all.  It was an attack, and a political master stroke.  By making this call, Bill Clinton, a former president and one-man publicity machine, injected the name "Al Sharpton" into the race, and linked it with Barack Obama.  Urgent Agenda readers don't have to be told that Sharpton could not be elected Miss Congeniality by white America.  He's a divisive, unpopular figure.  Now, figuratively, he was "representing" Barack Obama, a man who has struggled to transcend race.  From that moment on, Obama, probably unfairly, started to look like another "minority" candidate, not the transcending figure.  As I've said, he let the race issue get out of hand, and the Clintons were happy to play along.

Posted on January 19, 2008.