With three days to go until the fever of presidential politics descends on South Carolina, the stakes are higher here than anywhere in the country.
Either North Carolina Sen. John Edwards will win the Democratic primary in the state where he was born or he might have to drop out of the race.
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and retired general Wesley Clark will see who is better at talking to Southerners about the role of the military.
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman or the Rev. Al Sharpton will find out who best speaks of faith, while former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean will discover whether Southern Democrats hold a grudge over his comments about Confederate flags and pickup trucks.
Struggling Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich will make his first real campaign foray into the warmth of South Carolina where relatively few have taken him seriously.
The national media is fueling the fire. "In this campaign, South Carolina is the belle of the ball," said The New York Times.
Though six other states are voting on Feb. 3, South Carolina's primary is considered the biggest prize. Its importance hinges on three factors:
-- A 30 percent black population;
-- The loss of 19,000 manufacturing jobs in the past year;
-- Its status as the first primary vote in the South, where Democrats must show strength to have any chance of taking back the White House.
Iowa and New Hampshire are good places to start, "but those states don't represent the kind of vote you need to win in November," said former S.C. Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian.
South Carolina Democrats -- both black and white -- are more conservative than those in Iowa and New Hampshire, Harpootlian added, which means the state is a better proving ground to find a candidate who can challenge George Bush in November.
By most accounts the race is still wide open, so New Hampshire looms as a potential guidepost for undecided voters here. Edwards, who was born in Seneca in the Upstate, has been seen as the favorite in South Carolina, but more than 50 percent of voters remain undecided.
Emory University political scientist Merle Black said the South Carolina vote should be a showdown between Edwards and Clark, the two Southerners in the pack.
"South Carolina is going to be crucial for John Edwards and maybe for Wesley Clark," Black said, "because the world is not big enough for both of them."
"If Edwards is able to leap into second or third in New Hampshire, he would come into South Carolina as a very strong favorite," Black said. "If Clark is ahead of him, then South Carolina is the showdown for those two candidates."
Nobody else looks strong enough to challenge for first place here, Black said. "I don't see Kerry doing much in South Carolina, and Dean maybe won't be a factor by that time. Edwards needs to win South Carolina to show that his performance in Iowa wasn't a fluke."
Will the South Carolina winner be the party nominee, as has been the case on the Republican side?
"Depends," said College of Charleston political scientist Jamie McKown, who studies Democratic politics nationally. "If Iowa and New Hampshire both agree on Kerry, then a Kerry win in this state could make it a done deal."
Turnout models conducted by the S.C. Democratic Party indicate as many as 250,000 voters will cast ballots. That's more than double the 122,000 voters who took part in the Iowa caucus last Monday, but far fewer than the 576,000 who voted in the Bush-John McCain duel here in 2000, which Bush won to vault him to the GOP nomination.
In South Carolina, the primary goal is getting out the black vote.
"I suspect each campaign organization has been doing a lot to tap into the core constituencies of African-American churches as well as public officials," said University of South Carolina political scientist Todd Shaw, who follows black voting trends in the state.
Anecdotal information from Shaw's students indicates that ministers around the political hubs of Columbia and Charleston have been pressuring their congregations to get involved.
"The effort has been made to get African-Americans to recruit other African-Americans," Shaw said.
Sharpton's chances of making a statement in the primary hinge on getting a stage here; he's made more than 20 trips to the state.
Separate from the campaigns, Jim Felder, president and CEO of Columbia-based Voter Education Project, said several minority groups this week will undertake get-out-the-vote drives in town hall meetings around the state. His hope is to have more than 65 percent of the state's 570,000 black voters participate in the primary.
Except for Edwards' two appearances last week, the campaigning in South Carolina has been far different than in Iowa and New Hampshire. It has lulled in recent weeks. Most of the candidates have been in and out of the state quickly, relying on radio and TV ads as well as the media to get their messages across.
The war in Iraq hasn't been a dominant part of the debate so far, but it is a consideration for many voters.
"I'm leaning heavily on anyone who has a military background," retired shipyard worker Ernest Schwach said in a recent interview. Schwach is a former Democrat but has voted Republican in the past and likes what he hears from Clark.
The opinions of other local Democrats who will be voting on Feb. 3 vary, with many saying they are looking two or three potential candidates who'll get their support.
"I was going with Dean, but I'm going to wait and see what happens in the next few days," said Walter Brooks, 73. "Edwards is OK. It may be between the two of them."
"I thought about Clark for a bit, but now I don't know," said Edreca Gray. "I'm still undecided."
Other voters said they were going to buck conventional wisdom. A white voter who identified himself only as R. Hart, told The Post and Courier he planned to vote for Sharpton because of his blunt and honest discussions about race.
"I think he is the only one that is sticking to the facts," Hart said. "Everybody else is just skirting the issue."
For the week ahead, most of the campaign teams of candidates who survive New Hampshire could start arriving here by plane in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
After that, the candidates are set to debate live on MSNBC in Greenville on Thursday night.
South Carolina's Democratic U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings said that no matter what happens in the week ahead, the buildup to Feb. 3 has been a success because of all the attention the state has received. It also has rekindled interest in Democratic Party politics in South Carolina, a state that's become dominated by Republicans.
"A year ago we were in the dumps," Hollings said. "We lost the election and we had just about lost the party."
