Ladies and Gentlemen, we witnessed this evening a wonderful night [View All]

for John Edwards.

I say so because it wasn't all that long ago when he was polling in the high single digits in SC and after more concerted effort, in the low teens.

He received CONSIDERABLY more than that tonight. IMO there is a connection between Sen. Obama's strong victory, John Edwards' impressive surge out of the teens and into the 20s, and the changing of the national paradigm.

The idiot meme on MSM will be about who did not win his home state. That entirely misses the point. It's very much like saying "The Jones family next door no longer has their butter churn."

South Carolina has been a very conservative state forever. It is famous for secession fever in times past. It sent -- for DECADES -- the blood-and-bones bigot Strom Thurmond to the United States Senate, where he spent those decades as a segregationist xenophobe. Midway in his career in Congress, Thurmond still counted among his supporters veterans of the American Civil War. I personally knew a young man who spent time as an aide to Thurmond and had to assist him with personal daily living functions owing to Thurmond's decrepit health, yet SC voters continued, like lemmings, to send the old fool to Washington. "He's been in there so long, it would be kind of a shame to vote against him now," is how one SC Republican put it during the campaign for his last election.

James Pettigrew -- I'm way back in pre-Civil War times here -- said that South Carolina was "too small to be a State, and too large to be a mental asylum."

But tonight it gave a primary win to an Afro-American Democrat and it gave substantial and dedicated support to our John Edwards -- a son of the New South, the Evolved South, the Truer and higher-plain South, the South of more equality and better justice. In my youth white southern Democrats were:

NOT

like John Edwards. They were like STrom Thurmond.

We saw tonight an evolved South Carolina casting votes for Democrats who have evolved and developed and challenged themselves and others and have emerged as New American Candidates.

I congratulate Sen. Obama for his win. I think it is a campaign that needs some work. I think Donnie McClurkin was a case of extremely poor judgment, but I still honor the victory in so far as it signals a new day for the South generally and South Carolina especially, and:

I congratulate John Edwards and his campaign and all the volunteers -- including some from DU who showed up and did the volunteer work for a good cause -- for the actual, social change it represents in replacing the image of a segregationist past (Thurmond) with the promise of an ecomonically democratic future (John Edwards).

We carry more delegates to Denver after tonight than we had in our pockets before 7:00 p.m. Eastern when the polls closed in SC.

And we are going to shape the future of our country on that convention floor.

Go, John Edwards!