Edwards changes the equation

The battle for the Democratic nomination officially became a two-person race this week, when former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards announced he was ending his candidacy. Having come in third place in most of the early contests, Edwards’ decision was not unexpected. But the timing, just days before the 22 contests on Feb. 5, altered the landscape of the primaries in an unpredictable way, and sent Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama scurrying for the votes of his supporters. Edwards declined to endorse either candidate.

Obama is heading into Super Tuesday with a burst of momentum from a landslide victory in last week’s South Carolina primary. In that contest, Obama won 80 percent of the African-American vote and about 25 percent of the white vote, prompting Bill Clinton to liken Obama to Jesse Jackson. The racial connotations of that comment angered many Democrats, and helped lead to liberal lion Sen. Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama this week. Caroline Kennedy also threw her support behind Obama, describing him as the most “inspiring” leader since her father, John F. Kennedy.

Clinton handily won the Florida primary this week, but the Democratic Party will not seat Florida delegates at the convention, because the state party moved up its primary; by agreement, neither Clinton nor Obama campaigned there. Polls show Clinton maintaining a lead in California, New York, and several other crucial states that will vote next week. But Obama is running strongly in Illinois and several smaller states, and it is now considered highly unlikely that Super Tuesday will settle the race.

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At first blush, Obama would appear to be the big beneficiary of Edwards’ exit, said Christopher Cooper in WSJ.com. Edwards’ populism and calls for changing the culture of Washington resonate nicely with Obama’s own mantra of “change.” But “the issue of race injects a complication.” Polls suggest that many of the white rural voters who have been backing Edwards would not back a black candidate.

The race issue remains the great unknown of the 2008 campaign, said Dawn Turner Trice in the Chicago Tribune. The South Carolina vote left no doubt that Obama, the son of an African father and a white mother, can now count on the votes of African-Americans. But he also won plenty of white votes in Iowa and New Hampshire. Because “the race dynamic varies so much from state to state, we may not be able to cobble together a sweeping race statement for some time yet. Maybe never.”