CLINTON ON THE ROPES: Race Issues Loom as Obama Wins in Mississippi

[Purveyor]

Barack Obama easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's primary in Mississippi. But with six weeks to go before the next contest in Pennsylvania, mudslinging seems to have become en vogue.

It is the evening after Mississippi voters headed to the polls to make their choice as to who should be the Democratic candidate for president. Barack Obama's supporters are itching to celebrate his victory. But Obama himself is nowhere to be found. He has already headed north, to Pennsylvania, the site of the next contest.

Even as Mississippians were casting their ballots, Obama was busy making appearances in the next great battleground, where the primary will take place on April 22. By 10 p.m. on Tuesday evening, Obama was back in Chicago, and addressed his Southern supporters by video link. As he claimed his victory, he sat in front of an American flag with a bookshelf filling half of the background. Gravitas is the name of the game. He wants to appear presidential.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, doesn't even make a television appearance. The Senator from New York spent the whole day in Pennsylvania and issued a press release that she is looking forward to the next contest. Obama's victory in Mississippi? Nothing but a minor bump in the road on the way to the Pennsylvania showdown in April.

But it is a bump that just might change the itinerary. Not just because Obama's victory in Mississippi -- 61 percent to 37 percent -- surpassed even what the polls had predicted. Not just because his victory in Wyoming on Saturday launched him even further ahead in the delegate race: the count is 1608-1478 according to CNN.

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,540946,00.html