Will Obama Get A Bounce?

By CBSNews.com political reporter David Miller.

Yet the peculiarities of the South Carolina campaign - one marked by furious sparring between Obama and both Bill and Hillary Clinton - and the nature of the expectations game may have combined to put a unique burden on the Illinois senator, one that requires him to not only exceed expectations but also exceed them in a certain way.

Polls leading up to Saturday's vote show Obama leading Clinton by about 10 percentage points. But those same polls also show a significant "race gap" in Obama's support. While he holds a commanding lead among the state's African American voters, who are expected to make up about half of Saturday's electorate, his support among white voters is much lower, sometimes as low as 10 percent.

Those figures have prompted a discussion that would have seemed unthinkable the night Obama delivered a victory speech in front of an overwhelmingly white crowd in Iowa: Could he come out of South Carolina the victor, but also marginalized as a candidate who appeals primarily to black voters?

"There's a question, as we go forward, whether the outcome of the South Carolina campaign and the controversy there, had the effect, whether intentional or not, to paint his candidacy as largely a black campaign," said Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University. "I don't think we're at a point where we can make a determination one way or another on that."

Ransom said Obama, presuming he emerges from South Carolina victorious, will have to quickly address questions about his candidacy headed into Super Tuesday, when African Americans will make up a much smaller proportion of the electorate than they will in Saturday's contest.

"Now with February 5 looming he has to spend time explaining the strategy, the base, and the outreach and the universality of his campaign," Ransom said. "Not to say there's nothing he can't overcome, but there's not a whole lot of time between South Carolina and the 5th."

But the Obama campaign, which says it's "optimistic" about winning South Carolina, says the racial composition of his South Carolina support has little bearing on later contests.

"Two months ago, two things were happening: There were questions about whether Barack had very much support in the African American community and there were questions about if he was even going to have a close race in South Carolina," an Obama aide said. "In the last two months we've seen that change."

The story of the South Carolina campaign, as Obama's staff points out, is a telling example of how quickly narratives can change in politics. The Illinois senator was once dogged by questions of whether he was "black enough" due to his youth - he came of age after the Civil Rights Movement - and his ancestry, having not been a descendant of African slaves.

Obama's rhetoric also does not match the racially charged speech of previous black candidates like Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Sometimes, he's even been depicted as the preferred candidate of the Democratic Party's contingent of wealthy, white, college-educated liberals.

That aspect of Obama's candidacy should allow him to spin a South Carolina victory as a straight-up win, and not the product of identity politics, said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

"I think he's proven he can win among white voters, and I don't think necessarily the patterns in South Carolina are going to repeat themselves anywhere else, the same way the patterns in Iowa didn't repeat in New Hampshire," he said "Different states with different dynamics."

But, Mellman said, an Obama win in South Carolina does not come without problems.

"The real question for Obama is how much additional lift does he get going into other states," he said. "The question is, does it provide enough lift to put him into stronger contention in other states. Even losing New Hampshire, he did get a bounce from Iowa and he got a bounce nationally. But it's not enough of a bounce, it seems in a lot of states, to make up the difference. I don't think that has much to do with the racial competition of his vote, but how much attention gets paid to this victory."

The attention being paid to South Carolina isn't the only variable at hand, Obama's campaign argues. They believe the Super Tuesday states haven't gotten much attention either, even though they vote in less than two weeks - both Clinton and Obama only recently launched TV ads in some of those states.

Because of that, one aide said, voters there aren't truly engaged, and even those that say they're supporting one candidate haven't made a firm decision.

"I think that a win from Barack Obama is going to get headlines," the aide said. "It's going to get headlines at the time that another group of voters in these Feb. 5 states checks into the race. It's also pretty helpful that this primary is on a Saturday. This is going to be the front page of many Sunday newspapers across the country."
By David Miller