Since Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spat their dummies out at the latest democratic debate there has been a lot of talk about how the campaign has changed. The fact that Obama seemingly wanted to play it as "the nice guy" was shattered this week when he lowered himself to Clinton's level and she beat him with experience. Analysts are now asking what should Obama should do next?

There is seemingly a lot of scratching of heads going on over why Obama is still clinging to as much of the nice guy persona as he can. Certainly if he is truly "that nice" then it potentially affects his credibility to be the commander in chief, but if he is just holding back it makes him a poor strategist. Or does it?

Obama is overwhelmingly likely to win at the polls in South Carolina. With around 80% of the African-American vote in Nevada I would be very surprised if Obama doesn't turn out a 50%+ win and would even go as far as to say that 60% shouldn't be beyond him. If he doesn't reach either of these heights then it will say one of two things, either Hillary and the antics of the last week persuaded more of the white population to vote and to vote Hillary (as they are more inclined to do demographically than they were in New Hampshire), or that the worse prospect of African-Americans in the south not feeling so much for him as people thought.

But what if he does win with a 50% plus result? It is likely that Kucinich and Gravel will pick up about 2% of the votes as usual between them, which would leave about 48% of the vote between the other two main rivals of Obama. The key here is that Edwards is gaining in the polls and we all know that he hurts Clinton more than he hurts Obama, especially when it comes to splitting the white/poor demographic vote. I would still expect Clinton to get second, but only with around 30-35% with Edwards not too far behind. One could argue that the polls in New Hampshire lied to us once, but here in South Carolina the latest polls show a much lower "undecided" percentage this late in the day.

If this is the sort of win he can look forward to then his campaign will have a major boost, and maybe he is smarter than we are all giving him credit for, and it is from Monday next week in the wake of such a huge win that we will see him starting to really attack Clinton's record while she is on the back foot and desperately trying to avoid blaming her loss on race.