Sen. Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus on Thursday night (Jan. 3), the first major test for the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
The win dealt a blow to Clinton’s aspirations to be the first woman to claim president, while seriously boosting Obama’s chance to be the first African-American leader of the country.
“They said this day would never come,” Obama told a cheering crowd in Des Moines, Iowa. “They said our sights were set too high…years from now, you’ll look back and you’ll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope.”
During an hour-long broadcast of the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential debate held in December, Obama addressed the Hip-Hop generation, when quizzed by Dr. Ben Chavis, CEO of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and H3 Enterprises.
“I recognize and value the importance of millions of young voters,” Obama said. “During the last seven years, more Brown and Black families have gone into poverty. It is not acceptable to me that 37 million Americans now live in poverty. I believe that I am the only candidate that best represents real change.”
Voters in Iowa seem to agree with Obama’s statement.
The presidential hopeful won a historic victory, earning 38 percent of the vote in Iowa, where just 3% of the voters are African-American.
Former Senator John Edwards took 30 percent, while Senator Hillary Clinton won just 29 percent of the votes.
For the Republicans, Baptist-preacher-turned-governor Mike Huckabee leveraged his strong religious base to handily defeat Mitt Romney in Iowa.
Huckabee won 34 percent support with 25 percent going for Romney and Former Sen. Fred Thompson and Sen. John McCain coming in at third place.
Obama and Clinton will next battle in key primary elections in New Hampshire, Las Vegas and South Carolina.
