News Roundup, 1/28/08: Obama Ba-Rocks the South Carolina Vote

The polls all said that Barack Obama would be winning last Saturday's South Carolina Democratic primary — but none said that he would win by more than a 2 to 1 margin.

Obama pulled an astounding 78 percent of the South Carolina black vote on his way to victory; the black vote made for 55 percent of the total 532,000 votes cast in the primary — a turnout total that not only eclipsed the old record of 280,000 votes for the Democratic primary, but also remarkably beat the 446,000 vote turnout of last week's Republican primary. Yes, South Carolina saw a greater Democratic turnout than Republican. I don't have to tell you how well that bodes for Democrats in the general election.

But that wasn't the end of good news for Obama this weekend — in what may significantly help his Super Tuesday numbers in the delegate-heavy northeastern states, it was leaked that he would be receiving an endorsement from Ted Kennedy, along with two others of the Kennedy clan, Caroline and Patrick. This is a big, big deal, particularly for establishment Democrats, and Mark Halperin tells you why.

The Senate ran into a little trouble with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court bill sent to them by the House which, among other things, would have made telephone companies liable if they conducted surveillance without a warrant at the government's insistence. The bill was rejected 60-36. There is another bill in the Senate which is similar to this one, but it grants telecoms immunity for such surveillance. But many House members have pledged not to sign a bill with sucn an immunity.

In international news, Bush extended an offer this weekend to Pakistaki President Pervez Musharraf to send military into the country to help with the al-Quaeda threat there. Musharraf, unsurprisingly, refused. Instead, he offered a sharp rebuke:

"They wouldn't be able to achieve anything that we haven't been able to achieve, so let them handle Afghanistan," Musharraf said. "They need more force there, by the way. So therefore, please add force there before you think of sending them across into our borders," he said.

Finally today, we have some good news as far as labor goes: the percentage of union membership has increased for the first time since it began being tracked by the BLS in 1983. The increase was a very modest 0.1%, but considering that no such thing has ever happened before, it's an exciting development in what has been a flagging labor movement put down by corporate interests.