By Yvon Lacroix

 CSMS Magazine Staff writerHe did it again. Barack Obama has once again dethroned Mrs. Clinton after a nasty campaign in South Carolina. Obama’s victory was a landslide on Saturday night, winning 55 % of the vote, more votes than both Hillary and John Edwards combined. This was a stunning blow for Clinton, who had a commanding lead in the polls a year ago and whose husband, President Bill Clinton, pulled out the stops in recent days, crisscrossing the state to promote his wife and often drawing flak for a war of words that simmered between the Clinton and Obama camps.Barack Obama’s win was so impressive that his victory party began even before his supporters were allowed into the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. According to the Charleston Chronicle, “A crowd the length of a football field broke into chants of “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!” right at 7 p.m., when the polls closed and news organizations began to call the election for the Illinois senator.”This was also a colossal blow to many of the so-called historic black leaders and intellectuals who shunned the Illinois senator in favor of Hillary, citing they know Mrs. Clinton, who has fed them in the past, but they have yet to know Obama. This blatant opportunism has spit on their faces, for they will not hesitate to jump when and if it becomes clear that the Illinois senator’s party nomination is nothing but a sure thing. Super Tuesday will probably be their best indication and, perhaps, their best chance to jump in. So they’re waiting in the wings. But Obam himself has eschewed the state’s traditional black political establishment to build his own grassroots machine among African American voters, who see in Obama their best chance at making history in the White House.This was also a clear embarrassment for the ABC News “political analyst” George Stephanopulos, who for days has led the media blitz to portray Obama as a Black Candidate—shrewd maneuver to bring back racial politic in the grand black-and-while divide in order to marginalize the Obama campaign. On ABC’s Nightly News Friday evening, Stephanopulos claimed that Obama’s lead had narrowed, and that the race “now [was] a statistical dead heat between Hillary and Obama.”  He mused over his presumed fact that Bill Clinton had succeeded in portraying Obama as the Black Candidate. And he seemed to have praised Hillary for this “political coup.”They were wrong all the way. Obama’s rout was across the board. According to CNN exit poll data, not only did he win 44 of the state’s 46 counties, but he captured virtually every demographic, including women, men and young, middle-aged and elderly voters. It also proved that pollsters can be right and that he would head toward Super Tuesday on Feb. 5 with a big boost at his back.While the African American intelligentsia is offering lip service to the Obama campaign, the traditional White eastern establishment seems to be in a rush to lend their support to the Illinois senator. After senator John Carry last week, it is Caroline Kennedy’s turn, daughter of the late president Kennedy, who has endorsed Obama in an editorial in the New York Times. “Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves … and imagine that together we can do great things,” Kennedy wrote in The New York Times on Sunday. She went on to add in an article titled A President Like my Father, “Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.”  Blease Graham, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina, said an Obama win “is also a wake-up call for the established Democratic party that they can’t take things for granted — that their favorite candidate, Senator Clinton, is vulnerable to some meaningful challenge, not just a fringe challenge.”  In CSMS Magazine, although we applaud Barack Obama’s successes at the polls, we still believe that he is not the Messiah. And because his campaign has been financed and coordinated by the same political machine that sets the agenda for both foreign and domestic policies, an Obama government can at best keep the hope alive, but will not in the position to bring salvation to more than 50 million Americans living in poverty.Also see Is Barack Obama unstoppable after his stunning victory in Iowa last week?   The Obama campaign plunges deeper into the defensive after the Nevada lost last Saturday