Make no mistake: What happened in South Carolina today was a moral reprimand delivered to Bill and Hillary Clinton by a united Democratic Party--but especially by the African-American segment of that party.

I chased the Clintons around South Carolina yesterday and the absence of black faces at their rallies was striking--eerie almost, the absence a palpable presence, as if the rooms were filled with ghosts. In Penn Center on St. Helena Island, which has been a historic nexus of the civil rights movement going back to the civil war--a place where Martin Luther King Jr would sometimes go to live in a rude cabin, and to write and think--Bill Clinton looked out on a lily-white crowd and he must have known what he was seeing: a silent, decorous protest against him by a segment of the Democratic Party that was always there for him in the past, the churchified African-American middle class, a group that represents the Democrats' canary in the coal mine when it comes to injustice.

A mass, unspoken decision had been made that Bill and Hillary Clinton had behaved unjustly toward Barack Obama. It was the sort of decision that Bill Clinton might have tried to argue with, if it had come from the presss: "Hell, that Reagan thing...c'mon that's the kind of thing Republicans do to us all the time. Barack's gonna have to get used to it if he wants to play in the big leagues..." Except he had pulled the Reagan thing--trying to make it seem as if Obama had said that Reagan's ideas were better ideas--with the wrong audience...and I don't just mean black people, I mean an entire political party sick of games-playing.