Barack Obama spent the better part of last year trying to counter criticism that he wasn't "black enough"; now, following his rout of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in South Carolina, his detractors appear to be trying to cast him as the "black candidate" in the race.

Obama is doing his best not to be painted by anyone else's brush, but in South Carolina, which he won 55 percent compared to Clinton with 27 percent and Edwards at 18 percent, in many ways he was forced by Clinton's camp to make clear he is black.

Hoping to avoid falling into the pigeon hole created by conducting a campaign on a single issue, Obama gave a rousing victory speech Saturday night in which he did everything he could to transcend race while speaking directly to the undercurrent that drove much of the South Carolina battle.

"What we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us that we have to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won’t cross over. The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don’t vote. The assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate; whites can’t support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can’t come together," he said.

"But we are here tonight to say that this is not the America we believe in. I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina. ... I saw what America is, and I believe in what this country can be. That is the country I see. That is the country you see. But now it is up to us to help the entire nation embrace this vision. Because in the end, we are not just up against the ingrained and destructive habits of Washington, we are also struggling against our own doubts, our own fears and our own cynicism," Obama continued.

In this election of "viable" firsts -- first viable woman candidate, first viable black candidate -- South Carolina voters said they are confident the United States can look beyond race and gender.

FOX News exit polls showed that 77 percent of South Carolina voters said they think the country is ready to elect a black president and 76 percent said it is ready for a woman president. A large majority of voters said they'd be satisfied with either front-runner as the Democratic nominee.

But the race, in a lot of ways, did come down to race. No one asked directly, but if South Carolina voters based their decision on having the same skin color as the candidate, it would explain why 81 percent of black voters -- who made up 53 percent of the electorate -- chose Obama.

The polling also showed that 79 percent of black women who voted -- 33 percent of the overall electorate -- supported the Illinois senator over 19 percent who preferred the former first lady. Among white women, Clinton won by 44 percent to 34 percent for Edwards and 22 percent for Obama.

Notably, the public bickering between Obama and his opponent's husband, Bill Clinton, may have hurt Hillary Clinton. Twenty-six percent of voters said Bill Clinton was very important in deciding their vote, and of those 46 percent backed Hillary Clinton and 43 percent Obama.

The Clinton campaign strategy had been to place Bill Clinton in South Carolina to capitalize on his strong relationship with African-Americans in the state while Hillary Clinton focused on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5 states. But not only did voters want to hear from the candidate, rather than her surrogate, in the run-up to the vote, Bill Clinton frequently got into verbal spars over his suggestive comments that Obama was running a campaign based on race.

"They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender. That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here," the former president said while campaigning for his wife, leaving the impression that he thought blacks would not support a white alternative to Obama.

Asked about the vote results on Saturday night, the former president offered a curious comparison to an earlier era and contest.

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice -- in '84 and '88 -- and he ran a good campaign, and Senator Obama has run a good campaign," Bill Clinton said from Missouri, where he was campaigning for his wife. "He has run a good campaign everywhere. He is a good candidate with a good organization."

The resentment toward Bill Clinton's role in South Carolina was certainly evident at Obama's Columbia, S.C., victory party, where supporters briefly booed images of the former president when he appeared on network news being broadcast into the room. The booing was quickly subdued as the campaign suggested it was in bad form.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said that it's ridiculous to try to force Obama into the role of "the black candidate" since he got nearly 25 percent of the white vote in South Carolina, won the minority-poor state of Iowa, picked up 20 percent more votes than Edwards in another minority-deprived state, New Hampshire, and carried rural Nevada.

"It would be an unfortunate spin" for others to claim Obama can only win because of black voters, Axelrod said. "It's an attempt to marginalize that which cannot be marginalized."

Unlike the spin out of the Clinton campaign, Obama has been unifying candidates and attracting a broader coalition of voters, Axelrod said.

"In these contests we've won more votes and delegates than she has. I'm sure that is a very frustrating realization for the Clinton campaign," he said.

Clinton adviser Lanny Davis told FOX News that "the Clintons didn't play the race card" though "there were certain moments, certain phrases that I wish they didn't use."

He said Clinton won Nevada by appealing to Latinos, blue collar and middle class workers and women, and will appeal to a broad base on Super Tuesday, the next contest that counts for Democrats. Tuesday's Florida vote won't allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August. But civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton said, "Clearly a lot of African-Americans are very upset with the characterizations" of Obama as the "black candidate," and whether the characterizations were "intended or not, they came off very badly."

Sharpton said nothing can discredit Obama's "tremendous victory" but "to be fair, Hillary Clinton did get some black votes today, more than I thought she would given the acrimony."

FOX News analyst Susan Estrich added that she's not sure a victory in South Carolina would help Obama around the nation. "I've been sitting here for 20 minutes and I've heard the words 'race' and 'African Americans' about 20,000 times. The question is how it's going to play in the coming states," Estrich said, watching the returns. She added that lots of hostility still remains between blacks and Latinos in California, who also make up a large part of the electorate there, and that could perpetuate the race factor.

"The one to win on Super Tuesday is the one who goes beyond the race issue," Sharpton said.

Of course, winning the Democratic Party nomination is not just about engaging minorities but also about inspiring the electorate. Picking up a notable endorsement on Saturday, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, said she was supporting Obama because he can inspire Americans in the same way her father once did.

Kennedy wrote in a New York Times editorial that she never knew a president "who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them." But Obama, she said, could be that man.

Click here to read The New York Times editorial by Caroline Kennedy.

Clinton currently leads in overall delegates, largely because of support from so-called superdelegates, power players in the party who can support whomever they chose.

Axelrod said recent endorsements for Obama from top Democrats in red states like Nebraska, North Dakota, and Missouri indicate they believe Obama can succeed on GOP turf.

"A lot of leaders in our party who haven't chosen a candidate will be looking for a candidate who can carry the Democratic Party forward," Axelrod said. "The question is who can win Republicans and independents and who can build a new Democratic majority. We think we offer that opportunity."

"Either one of these candidates are going to go down to the finish line ... and (the Democrats) will be a united party" in the general election, Davis said.

FOX News' Major Garrett, Dana Blanton and Sharon Kehnemui Liss and The Associated Press contributed to this report.