In an interview with NBC that was broadcast this morning, Obama said some new and interesting stuff to minimize the political fallout that he and Hillary have been navigating in the wake of their bitter racial dust-ups. For instance, he downplayed his loss of white support in South Carolina:

"Well, I’m not sure that, you know you take one poll, there are other polls that show us getting 19%, 20%, holding pretty steady. But of you also look at this campaign. We’ve won in Iowa. Which is 94% white. We’ve practically tied in New Hampshire. With the same ratios. We’ve won in some of the most diverse states and some least diverse states...

"You’ll recall that early in this campaign everybody was asking am I black enough, right? You know, there's a constant narrative that goes back and forth. What our message has been is consistent. I’m not running as a black or a white candidate."

Obama also denied he'd personally accused the Clintons of racism:

"I didn't have an exchange with Senator Clinton over race. I did not say at any point that I thought they were talking about race. Take a look. There’s not a single quote in which that's been a suggestion I’ve made...I don't view them as having gone after me on the basis of race."

The closest Obama himself came to suggesting this is the following comment about Hillary's Martin Luther King remark: "I think it offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King's role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act." This doesn't constitute Obama himself making the charge.

However, Obama's interviewer on NBC did say that the Illinois Senator acknowledged that surrogates on both sides had pushed the race story along. Indeed, Obama aide Steve Hildebrand was quoted yesterday as follows:

"The Clintons have always put people in a box — they look at everything through racial lines, gender lines, geographic lines; they tend to segment people...If the Clintons paint him as the black candidate, no one's going to stop them from doing that. They are playing the same old-style games."

Meanwhile, the voting is today in South Carolina, and we'll be blogging the results right here at Election Central.

Separately on the racial dust-up front, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert hit the Clintons hard today -- and even used a single anonymous racist blog posting to bash Bill and Hillary as gleeful about racism.