Why Hillary? 'She doesn't need a tour of the White House'

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- State Sen. Darrell Jackson's public relations firm, Sunrise Communications, is located in an old clapboard house on the east side, the former home of Nathaniel Jerome Frederick, the first black man admitted to the bar in South Carolina. It's within shouting distance of the digs of Tom Turnipseed -- a local Democratic lawyer who is known around town for his seersucker suits.

Richland County, where the South Carolina capital sits, is the home of several universities, and it is one of the few staunchly Democratic counties in the state. Plus South Carolina, which has a population about half the size of the Chicago metropolitan area, is the first Democratic southern primary, and it is a state that is beginning to turn a little more purple as liberal-minded boomers move from the North to golf communities. It is why Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards will make many stops here on the money-raising, vote-getting trail.

As I enter Jackson's office last Friday, the former dining room of the house is filled with young men and women plotting radio and television time for Clinton's visit to Columbia on Monday. Jackson, a shrewd opportunist who also heads a church of 10,000, has signed on as Hillary's local media strategist for $10,000 a month. Some of his fellow Democrats mutter that Jackson is a charlatan for wearing the hats of senator, pastor and PR man, but that didn't stop a bidding war for his services among Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

Jackson says, "Obama is impressive," but he's known Hillary longer, first meeting her in 1992 when Bill Clinton came to Columbia to campaign. "Obama is warm and engaging," he says, "but the vast difference between Hillary Clinton and Obama is that she has the Rolodex, and she doesn't need a tour of the White House." Poor Edwards, at this point it looks as if it's going to be a schlep uphill for him to win the state where he was born.

Most other African Americans in Columbia aren't as involved yet as Jackson. Kay Patterson, serving his last year in the South Carolina Senate, notes: "It's too damn far out, and all of them are running. I'm not going to get involved in presidential politics a year out."

There seems to be a lack of confidence -- a disbelief that a black man can become president. "It's a slim possibility for him to get the nomination, but then everyone else is doomed," state Sen. Robert Ford told the Associated Press last week, plunging his foot into his mouth. "Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose --because he's black and he's top of the ticket. ..."

But while Ford's comments were egregious, it may get worse. On Monday, a Los Angeles Times reporter digging deep into Obama's 1994 biography, Dreams From My Father, pointed out Obama may have inflated his role as community activist on Chicago's South Side in the mid-1980s.

There will be more stones like this, more questions about Obama's days in college and his drug use and his work in Chicago. Obama will need to bite his lip and muddle through.

South Carolina Democrats say they want to see if he has the right stuff. If not, they're going with Hillary.

jhunter@suntimes.com