Dawn Crawford vs Dirty County Politicians and  Officials

By Chris Levister

Sen. Barack Obama coasted to victory and picked up five more delegates than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Mississippi's Democratic primary Tuesday.

Obama won 19 delegates and Clinton 14. He won roughly 90 percent of the Black vote, but only one third of the white vote, extending a pattern that carried him to victory in earlier primaries in South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.

The Illinois senator padded his overall delegate lead, in the last contest before the delegate rich April 22 primary in Pennsylvania. Mississippi had 33 national convention delegates at stake.

Senator Barack Obama D-Illinois speaks to students at the University of Mississippi.

Obama's win was sizable enough to erase most if not all of Clinton's 11-delegate gain from last week, when she won three primaries.  But Clinton was able to hold down Obama's delegate gains by winning one of the state's four congressional districts. Obama carried the other three.

Overall, Obama had 1,598 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,487. It takes 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination at the party's national convention this summer.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain clinched the nomination last week.

Earlier in the day Obama's campaign denounced comments by Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton fundraiser and 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, that Obama only got this far because he is Black.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is, and the country is caught up in the concept," Ferraro said in an interview with the Daily Breeze, a Torrance, California newspaper.

Clinton expressed disappointment with Ferraro's comments, saying, "It's regrettable that any of our supporters - on both sides, because we both have this experience - say things that kind of veer off into the personal."

Obama called Ferraro's remarks "patently absurd and said he would support Clinton if she won the nomination."

The candidates wasted no time moving on from Hattiesburg, Mississippi to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where the primary in six weeks is expected to be what Gov. Ed Rendell called "a horse race to the finish."

In February Rendell, a Clinton supporter, was quoted as saying, "whites in Pennsylvania are unlikely to vote for a Black candidate."