Top line: Clinton wins Pennsylvania by 10%. Simon Burns MP will be pleased!
She's been beaten in so many small states. She's behind in the popular vote. Key aides to her husband have backed Barack Obama. It's very hard to see her path to winning the nomination given Obama's delegate lead. There are constant calls for her to stand aside for the sake of the Democrats but she just keeps on going. This is the Wall Street Journal's take:
"First in bellwether Ohio, and now in another crucial swing state, the New York Senator has shown her tenacity. She and her husband are nothing if not relentless, and Mr. Obama can be forgiven if he wakes up at night thinking he's in one of those "Terminator" movies where the machine in the form of a human being just keeps coming. Nothing – not Bill Clinton's gaffes, not the Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy, not even being outspent 3-to-1 – has been able to stop her."
Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard has similar thoughts (my emphasis): "Maybe we should acknowledge that Hillary Clinton is a pretty impressive candidate. She’s tough, disciplined, and not unappealing. She’s a good debater and adapts pretty quickly (if a bit clunkily) to campaign developments. Her campaign organization and strategists have been inferior to Obama’s--but she’s gotten more total votes than he (counting Michigan and Florida--the voters there are people too!). And she’s done this while bearing the burden of her husband."
Her challenge is to convince voters - as she did in Pennsylvania and Ohio - that her fighting instincts will be put to the service of ordinary Americans and aren't self-serving.
Watch Hillary Clinton's victory speech - described by pollster Frank Luntz as "fantastic, absolutely the best speech I've heard her give." Obama may have been portrayed as Rocky on YouTube but the real fighter is Hillary - as Gerard Baker notes - her key message: "Well Hillary's spoken and I think we've got the message. She's a fighter. A Fighter. A FIGHTER. She's going to fight for you and fight for me and fight against them. She's going to fight them in the shopping malls and in the bowling alleys and in the pool halls. She'll fight until the last dog dies. And then she'll get up and start fighting again. FIGHT!"
So where are we now in the Democrat race? Josh Marshall at TPM: "Going into tonight I think the dividing line was about 8 points. Closer than that and the story would have been that Obama didn't win but closed the margin (which is how it looked early in the evening). A bigger margin than that and the story would be that Hillary got her big victory. So the 10 point spread is close to the dividing line but on Hillary's side of it. There's a lot of crowing from Hillary's campaign tonight about a shift in momentum and doubts about Obama. Tomorrow there will be a lot of chatter from Obama's campaign that none of that really matters because of the reality of the delegate numbers which won't change much."
