Opinion: The morning after South Carolina

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Size matters.

Not always, but in the matter of Barack Obama’s much-bigger-than-expected triumph in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, it certainly does. Here are some of the questions raised by his 2-to-1 margin of victory over Hillary Clinton:

-- Will Bill Clinton rein himself in?

His campaigning in South Carolina appears to have helped turn a probable loss for his wife in South Carolina into a spanking. And a parting comment he made concerning Jesse Jackson may hurt her standing even more among black voters in future primaries.

The ex-president clearly is not going to vanish from the trail (especially when there’s so much ground to cover leading up to Super Tuesday). And many of the states with Feb. 5 contests -- including most of the major ones -- are friendly turf for the Clintons. So we’ll be watching for a change of tone from him in the next few days: An emphasis on reminding Democrats what they revered about him, rather than offering asides about Obama or venting various frustations.

-- Will Obama get a sustained boost from his South Carolina win?

If he does, he’ll be the first -- in either party -- in this campaign. As we’ve noted before, so far the series of single-state faceoffs have had limited, if any, effect ...

on the next. Obama’s showing in South Carolina is a much-needed sendoff for him now that he must focus on more than 20 states at once, but its impact is likely to fade quickly.

Unaddressed by the South Carolina results, for instance, is whether Obama can make any inroads into the advantage Hillary Clinton enjoys among Latino voters, who are a crucial bloc in several of the Feb. 5 states. His mentions of Latinos in his Saturday night victory speech were telling, but rhetoric alone won’t do the trick. We’ll be watching for evidence that Obama’s campaign has spent some of the massive amount of money it’s raised on targeting the Latino vote.

-- What’s up with the polls?

They missed the winner in New Hampshire. They missed the sweep of Obamania in South Carolina.

Obama moved ahead to stay in surveys of the state following his win in the Iowa caucuses. And a couple of the most recent polls gave a hint that he was going to win big. But none came close to presaging an almost 30-percentage-point margin. The final average for the polls aggregated at RealClearPolitics.com had him up by 11.6 points.

Maybe it’s the unpredictability of large turnouts dropping off the numbers. Whatever, perennial warnings about the potential imprecision of polling for primaries clearly have needed to be heeded.

-- Don Frederick