Its already too late in the evening to do extensive commentary, so I'm going to outsource it all. Here is some of the best commentary I've found today on the future of the race...
After Mississippi votes next Tuesday, Pennsylvania will become the new Iowa; with no competing contests, it will be the target of unremitting national attention. And it will be a brutal battlefield. For all the glib comparisons to Ohio, its rustbelt neighbor, there are significant differences that could aid Obama. Pennsylvania has a larger black population than Ohio, larger cities, and a larger student population. In contrast to Texas, it has a small Latino population. It has populous white liberal suburbs around Philadelphia.
On the other hand (advantage Hillary), it has the second-largest senior electorate in America, behind Florida. It has a large population of lunch-bucket guys, just as in Ohio. And, perhaps most importantly, the Keystone State primary is open only to registered Democrats. Obama-friendly independents need not bother to show up - unless they re-register as Democrats in advance, by the March 24 deadline. It's hard to imagine that these converts will vote in the same numbers as the independents in other states.
Clinton's SYMBOLIC victory in Ohio suggests that the post-industrial OLD-LINE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS are still not sold on him. That is to say, the working class white men and women whom he had been attracting in Wisconsin, but lost ground with in Ohio.
HE NEEDS TO PROVE THAT HE CAN WIN THEM OVER, decisively. And he needs to win them in primaries, not caucuses, in order to beat back the Clintonian myth that he can only win in caucuses because they are stacked with LATTE-DRINKERS AND COLLEGE PROFS AND ACTIVISTS.Pennsylvania is not only a big state, it is a post-industrial state conveniently full of old-line Democrats with a Democratic-only primary. From a MATH point of view, it's a "would be nice to win" state.
But from a SYMBOLIC point of view, it's a MUST TO WIN state if Obama is to have any hope of convincing the party elders (ie, superdelegates) that he's earned the full backing of the party he seeks to represent.
ALL PREVIOUS EVIDENCE suggests that the longer voters are exposed to Obama, the more they like him. So my feeling is: he has seven weeks before Pennsylvania: HE SHOULD GO LIVE THERE NOW.
Clinton's problem now is that she doesn't need to beat Obama, she has to convince the superdelegates to beat Obama for her. And this requires a different sort of argument. Even under assumptions very favorable to Clinton, Obama is likely to end the primaries with 100-or-so more pledged delegates than she has. Her only hope is that the party elders, the so-called superdelegates, will grow so uncomfortable with Obama's weaknesses that they'll intervene on her behalf, risking the ire of their constituents, the fury of African-American voters who feel betrayed by their party, and a convention storyline that blames a smoke-filled backroom for overturning the will of the voters. That's a tall order.
To convince them to do so, she'll need to fatally wound Obama. But attacking that ferociously will destroy her candidacy, too, and infuriate superdelegates who see her irreversibly bloodying the Democrats' likely nominee, and thus hurting the party's chances for victory. What she really needs is for Obama to independently collapse, so the superdelegates have a reason to turn on him. But that's exceedingly unlikely. The only close contender for unsettling the superdelegates is if Obama, rather than collapsing, proves himself passive and vulnerable before Clinton's continuing assault, and thus suggests that he'll be shredded by the Republicans' fusillade. Democrats, after years of cowering before the right wing's attacks, will not send a political pacifist into the general election.
Obama must not let the Clintons into his head. He has to make this campaign about his positive ideas again. Their goal is to destroy his inspiration, to make this election about who you're most familiar with in a world of nasty Republicans and nasty Islamists. His goal must be to swamp them, as he has already, with his talent, his reason, and his optimism.
I think the big question is, can he fight back? Can he take this back to Hillary Clinton, demonstrate his ability to take punches and punch back? By this I don't mean that he's got to go ballistic on her or go after Bill's business deals or whatever else her vulnerabilities might be. Candidates fight in different ways and if they're good candidates in ways that play to their strengths and cohere with their broader message. But he's got to show he can take this back to Hillary and not get bloodied and battered when an opponent decides to lower the boom.
It would be nice if one of them did break through to the other side, did start winning voters out of the other candidate's base. That would give superdelegates some tangible achievement on which they could base their vote. Because if Florida (retirees) and Michigan (white working class) have primaries rescheduled for June, and Clinton wins them both by dint of demographics, then it's possible the delegate and popular vote counts may be nearly even at the close of the primary season. Which would put the superdelegates in a justifiable dither: If the primary contest is done and it comes out even, and if the dividing lines in the party aren't those of policy but those of identity -- what, dear God, is a superdelegate to do then? And how should the supes calculate the candidates' respective strengths against John McCain?
... So what's Obama to do? He can't very well downplay the Pennsylvania primary in any case, though demographically it's clearly Hillary's to lose. (The state's median age is the second highest in the land, after only Florida's.) He should play to his strength in Philadelphia and its suburbs, and in the new university-health care economy of Pittsburgh. But he should also make the hard slog through the old towns of old people who don't often see people who look like Obama and who trust them even less. He should talk to them about his work for displaced steel workers in Chicago, about the way in which Wall Street and both political parties abandoned people like them, about concrete projects to rebuild the state's infrastructure, about trade. (He should shoot Austen Goolsbee). Nobody expects him to win Pennsylvania anyway. And if he can have a respectable showing, or better, it's his best chance to win one on Clinton's terrain. Which is probably the one sure way to impress superdelegates desperate for benchmarks to which they can cling.
Andrew Sullivan, again:
Obama has a tougher, nastier opponent in the Clintons than he does in McCain. If he wins this by a long, grueling struggle, he will be more immune to the lazy, stupid criticism that he is some kind of flash in the pan, he has more opportunity to prove that there is a great deal of substance behind the oratory, he has more of a chance to meet and talk with the electorate he will need to win in the fall.
...in today's America race is actually more of a factor in the Democratic politics of "border states" like Ohio, Tennessee and Indiana than it is in the "Deep South." In the latter region, racism has been thoroughly integrated into Republican politics while the kind of counter-forces that would keep racially conservative whites aligned with Democrats -- primarily unions and economic populism -- are virtually nonexistent.
In the "border states," though, you have a collision between old patterns of racist sentiments bleeding up from the South and traditions of populism and white working class unionism bleeding down from the Rustbelt North. Ultimately, I think this means that while you may find more out-and-out racists in Alabama or Texas, you're more likely to encounter latent racist sentiment among a broad segment of Democrats somewhere like Ohio or Tennessee.If I'm right, this could be at least a partial explanation for why Obama performed better in southern, red Texas than in midwestern, purple Ohio. It could also explain the odd pattern we've repeatedly seen of Obama performing very well in both the states with the highest African American populations and the lowest, but not as well in those in the middle where ethnicities are more mixed.
It's worth noting that nothing about yesterday's results necessarily vindicates the Clinton campaign's strategy of effectively conceding most the states between Super Tuesday and Texas, and allowing Obama to run up huge margins, both in votes and delegates, in nearly all of them. It isn't as if the firewall strategy allowed her to barely stave off an Obama surge that might have succeeded if she'd spread her time and resources around. The Obama surge did succeed, in Texas at least, thanks to his momentum out of the Mid-Atlantic: He swamped her firewall and pulled into the lead, and it appears that she only regained the upper hand thanks to some hard-edged last-minute campaigning. If she could have narrowed his margins in states like Virginia and Wisconsin, she might not have lost the lead in Texas in the first place - and more importantly, she'd have higher delegate and vote totals to carry into the looming argument over whose "moral claim" on the nomination is the stronger one.
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