One of the unsettling questions after Barack Obama finally threw Jeremiah Wright under the bus last week was whether he would lose any of the Black vote that’s been supporting him in an unheard-of 90%+ block.
Well, after last night’s blow-out performance in North Carolina, the hand-wringers will have to find another negative to obsess over – Blacks continue to support Obama almost to a voter, and the Wright fiasco has done nothing to dampen this.
Obama’s loss in "the tie-breaker" state of Indiana means he still can’t close the deal with non-Blacks and non-college kids, but the narrowness of his loss there will surely move momentum to his nomination. However, there is no mandate for Obama here. Team Hillary has Barack by the short and curleys, and expect them to now take the high road and broker a power-sharing deal with Camp Obama to put the Democratic party back together – no matter what Rachel Maddow thinks (her naïve insistence last night on the MSNBC panel that Hillary will push this thing to the streets of Denver may have cost Rachel her own show; it was breathtakingly amateur-hour).
Things will happen rapidly now. Expect to see, if not an Obama-Clinton ticket, a huge Clinton presence in an Obama White House. One interesting wild card in all this is how it will sit with lose-cannon Michelle Obama, who will see such Clinton involvement as just another case of not giving a Black man full, legitimate power.
Regardless, it’s clear that Barack and Hillary are now well into their mating dance, and we could very well see this nation’s first Black President and Female Vice President, or at least Female Cheneyesque power broker. Interesting times, indeed.