Obama beats Hillary in Mississippi

Barack Obama trounced Hillary Clinton in Mississippi's Democratic primary, riding huge support from African Americans, as a nasty new race row rocked their White House battle.
The Illinois senator punched back with his second win in a row since the former first lady's campaign-saving wins in Texas and Ohio last week, which halted his own 12-contest win streak and extended their epic struggle.
Even as Mississippi voted, the tone of the contest took another negative lurch, as the Obama camp demanded the ouster of Hillary supporter Geraldine Ferraro, who put Obama's stunning rise in big-time US politics down to his race.
Mississippi was the last showdown in the Democratic race before the more significant Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
"We have had a terrific week, we have won Wyoming, we have won Mississippi," Obama told MSNBC after his victory.
Mississippi did not change the race, but allowed Obama to pad his lead in the hunt for nominating delegates doled out after each state contest.
Hillary campaign manager Maggie Williams congratulated Obama and looked forward to Pennsylvania and beyond, but there was no direct comment from the candidate herself.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting in Mississippi, Obama won 61 percent of the vote compared to 37 percent for Hillary.
Television exit polls showed a large racial divide: half of the Democratic electorate was African Americans, nine in ten of whom went for Obama, according to MSNBC figures.
Fox News exit polls said white men voted for Hillary 69 to 30 percent, and white women by 74 percent to 26 percent.
According to a tally by RealClearPolitics.com, the Mississippi victory left Obama with 1,606 delegates compared to 1,484 for Hillary -- both well short of the 2,025 necessary to clinch the party's nomination.
The latest racially tinged row of an increasingly ugly campaign raged after Ferraro told a California newspaper: "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."
The first African-American with a viable shot at the White House, Obama called the remarks by the woman who made history as the Democrats' 1984 vice presidential candidate "patently absurd."
"I don't think that Geraldine Ferraro's comments have any place in our politics or the Democratic Party," he told Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call.
New York Senator Hillary said she did "not agree" with the comments and found it "regrettable" that supporters might resort to personal attacks, but did not cut Ferraro loose from her finance committee.
In a second interview with the Daily Breeze, which carried her original remarks, Ferraro escalated the row.
"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up," she said.
"Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"
Even if Florida and Michigan repeat their contests after having their delegates stripped for holding their primaries early, neither candidate can cross the magic threshold of 2,025 delegates.
So the nomination will likely rest in the hands of nearly 800 "superdelegates," Democratic party officials now under enormous pressure from the two campaigns to sway one way or another.
Republicans also voted Tuesday.
But as Senator John McCain has already clinched enough delegates to be the party's standard-bearer in the November presidential election, there was little question about the outcome. McCain had 79 percent of the vote with 99 percent counted.