He has some interesting analysis about the dynamics of the race.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/on-south-carolina-and-self-image/">On South Carolina and Self-Image
Almost two years ago now, I interviewed Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist, at a Starbucks in Northwest Washington. At that time, Mr. Trippi hadn’t signed on with any of the campaigns, and he laid out a case for why Hillary Clinton couldn’t be beaten in the primaries. The reason was simple: black voters.
Let’s just say, Mr. Trippi argued, that you could beat her in Iowa or even in New Hampshire, or come close enough so that her candidacy no longer seemed a sure thing. Well, Mr. Trippi said, then you’d go to the South, and in a Democratic primary there, black voters account for 40, even 50 percent of the electorate. African Americans don’t just like the Clintons, he said—they adore them. And that was the real firewall, Mr. Trippi said. If you could get just a third of that black vote, then you could change the entire equation, but barring that, Senator Clinton was going to sweep the South and probably some big industrial states, too.
...snip...
After all, Mr. Obama has always seen himself, near as we can tell, as a man who transcends ordinary conventions about race, who isn’t really a “black politician.” And yet here he is being compared to Jesse Jackson and depending heavily on his connection with black voters to forge the kind of coalition he needs. Now race is his firewall, not Mrs. Clinton’s — the main thing that makes him, at this late date, such a formidable insurgent. One can imagine that it’s not easy for Mr. Obama to get his head around that.
The post-South Carolina reality has to be even more disconcerting, though, for Senator Clinton. This is a woman, don’t forget, who came into politics during the civil rights era and who has, at every opportunity in her public life, dedicated herself, along with her husband, to the idea of racial equality. And now she wakes up to find—in fact, she probably understood it weeks ago, when she decided to go hard at Mr. Obama—that not only have those black voters deserted her, but that her campaign now hinges, to a large extent, on racial polarization. This is unpleasant but undeniable: the more white and Latino voters perceive Mr. Obama to be the candidate of black America, the more likely Mrs. Clinton is to win. Strategically, the Clintons have adapted to this reality. Personally, however, it is a direct contradiction to everything they have tried to embody for decades, and it has to hurt.
...snip...
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