Hillary Rodham Clinton has won in South Carolina.

No, not Saturday's primary _ though it's no longer outside the realm of possibility that Clinton will defeat Barack Obama here. What she has won in South Carolina is the larger campaign to polarize voters around race and marginalize Obama (in the insidious words of one of her top advisers) as "The Black Candidate."

The most recent public and private polls show the New York senator narrowing Obama's lead in South Carolina, with the electorate divided along racial lines. A new McClatchy/MSNBC survey shows that Obama's support among white Democrats fell in one week from 20 percent to a mere 10 percent, a staggering decline that could portend trouble for Obama in majority-white contests beyond Saturday.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who is running third, appeared to pick up the white support Obama lost.

It is too easy to lay blame at Clinton's feet. True, she did spark racial tension with an ill-advised assessment of the civil rights struggle (President Johnson carried out Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream), hours after her husband, Bill, took a jab at Obama (his Iraq posturing is a political "fairy tale") during the New Hampshire primary campaign.

And the former president knowingly fanned the flames by lashing out at the media and the Obama campaign over an unspecified "hit job," raising the specter of race as he campaigned furiously and petulantly on behalf of his wife.

But it was not just the Clintons who played the race card. There were plenty of people dealing from the sordid deck: Obama advisers who pointed reporters to the remarks; Obama supporters who took the Clintons' remarks out of context to condemn them; a Clinton surrogate who made a veiled reference to Obama's drug use as a youth; the conflict-obsessed media that exaggerated every twist of the race debate; black voters who publicly declared a black man is unelectable; and white voters who openly admitted that they or their neighbors couldn't vote for a black man.

If nothing else, South Carolina has reminded us, sadly, that race is still an issue in America.

As for Obama and Clinton, racially tinged remarks were slipped into their stump speeches like so many stale bread crumbs. On Friday, the New York senator praised New York Rep. Charles Rangel as a man who rise to power without "leapfrogging" _ a term that any thinking member of her predominantly black audience understood to apply to the precocious Obama.

The Illinois senator, following a strategic template that his top adviser, David Axelrod, has deployed to elect other young black politicians, waited until as late as possible in the campaign to start overtly identifying with the black community. He did so in South Carolina, where blacks make up half or more of the Democratic electorate.

"I need you to grab Cousin Pookie to vote," Obama said, playfully breaking out the black vernacular in Kingstree, S.C., on Thursday. "I need you to get Ray-Ray to vote."

David Smith, 36, a black voter backing Obama, shook his head in disgust as he discussed the spat over race while awaiting for Obama to speak in Sumpter, S.C.

"They both ought to knock it off," he said of Obama and Clinton. "It's not becoming of a past or future president."

A black man who identified himself as a pastor told Bill Clinton at an event in Kingstree, S.C., that black voters should rally behind his wife to keep Republicans out of the White House. Of white Americans, he said: "They're not ready for a black president."

Several black audience members nodded and said, "That's right."

"I have to tell you I hope you're not right," Bill Clinton responded.

Unfortunately, the man may be right. At least that's a hard-to-escape conclusion when you talk to enough white voters who firmly deny that race plays a role in their decision but _ guess what? _ it matters to their friends, neighbors and co-workers.

"It doesn't matter to me, really, but race will be a problem for Obama," said Haley Bishop, an 18-year-old white resident of Columbia. Interviewed outside a book store near her home, she said, "A lot of people around here aren't ready for that."

Kathy Adams, a lawyer attending a Hillary Clinton event in Anderson, S.C., blamed the media.

"I have a message for the press _ South Carolina is not what you're portraying it to be," she said, wagging her finger at the press corps. "We don't care about a person's color or gender. We care about finding a leader."

The sad fact is that, for a week or so in South Carolina, there was hardly a leader to be found.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Ron Fournier has covered politics for The Associated Press for nearly 20 years. On Deadline is an occasional column.