Undecided voters watch Obama-Clinton fracas

In his Thursday campaign stops Clinton was avoiding mention of Obama and sticking to his traditional approach: intense, data-heavy seminars in public policy. No politician loves statistics more or deploys them as often and as effortlessly as Bill Clinton.

“Hispanic Americans, given the same exact diet and the same exercise, are 1.7 times as likely to become diabetic as Americans of European heritage, African-Americans 1.8 times, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders two times as likely,” Clinton told students Thursday morning at Claflin University, South Carolina’s oldest historically black college..

His pitch for votes was at times subtle.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters among African-Americans in South Carolina mostly seem to be keeping their loyalties quiet.

OK to vote for Hillary
Clinton sought to reassure the students at Claflin that it was OK it vote for Hillary Clinton — despite any peer pressure to vote for Obama. “You can have arguments with your friends; you don’t have to agree with them, maybe you don’t even vote for the same people at election time,” he told them.

Was Clinton convincing South Carolinians to vote for Hillary Clinton, or was he a one-man extravaganza, worth seeing for himself, even if the voter in the end might decide to not vote for Hillary Clinton?

Nostalgia drove some of those who turned out to see Bill Clinton.

Video Clinton: Helping or hurting? Jan. 23: A Hardball panel debates: Is former President Bill Clinton helping Sen. Hillary Clinton’s, D-N.Y., presidential campaign, or is he hurting the Democrats? Hardball

Eugene Allen, an Air Force veteran and former corporate executive, said he came because he wanted to catch up with him after 20 years.

Back in 1987 he heard Clinton speak at Claflin University and was so impressed that he urged him to run for president.

“He remembered that very well,” Allen said Wednesday after chatting with Clinton at Claflin.

Guarded about revealing their choices
South Carolina voters, far more than those in New Hampshire and Iowa, are very guarded when asked who they’ll vote for.

“I’m not really 100 percent, I guess I’ll make that decision when I go behind the curtain Saturday,” Allen said. Clinton’s speech “has not affected what I’ll do behind the curtain.”

Father Don Abbott, a transplanted Bostonian and a Catholic priest who is pastor of two churches, one in Walterboro, with a mixed, white, black and Latino congregation, the other in an area of Colleton County called Catholic Hill, which is all black, came to hear Bill Clinton speak Thursday in Walterboro.

Was he convinced by Bill to vote for Hillary? “Well, he convinced me that he’s a smart son of a gun. He’s always been the smartest president we’ve ever had besides John F. Kennedy.”

Between voting for Obama or for Clinton, “at this point I’m undecided. And when I get decided I don’t dare to tell anyone … I’ve listened to my parishioners in Catholic Hill, I’ve listened very carefully and not one of them has told me who they are going to vote for. People will surprise you. Especially here in the South you have to be careful who you tell what to.”

Picking the president: The candidates Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed. John McCain                Barack Obama

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