Obama's One-State Wonder

A day ahead of time, I feel reasonably comfortable doing something I never do: predicting the results of a state primary race. Barack Obama will win the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary. But his campaign will most likely incur a crippling blow on Super Duper Tuesday on February 5, when he loses the California primary.

Obama has a 13-point lead in a South Carolina Zogby poll released today.

And even though he had similar leads in similar polls right before the New Hampshire primary, this time the polls make sense. African-American voters make up the majority of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina; they did not in New Hampshire.

We are still a nation of voters who take race into account in our voting decisions, and it's just as true for any group, whites and Latinos included.

The racial advantage that will help Obama in South Carolina will not help him in California, where the dominant Latino vote will help Hillary Clinton to victory, or so I believe.

Meanwhile, Clinton made the rounds of the morning news shows cleaning up after her husband's bad-cop routine.

"He said several times yesterday that maybe he got a little bit carried away," she said on CBS's Early Show.

She did so after winning the coveted endorsement of the New York Times editorial board, which chided her for husband's behavior and warned that it could backfire against her down the road by stirring up Democratic divisions.

By Bonnie Erbe