It had been predicted all week that Senator Hilllary Clinton would win the West Virginia primary by a whopping margin. Some said such a victory, highlighting flaws in front-runner Senator Barack Obama’s coalition, could make Superdelgates think twice while others others said it would be too late. So what has changed?

Media reports generally echoed this article by McClatchy Newspapers:

Hillary Clinton clobbered Barack Obama in West Virginia Tuesday, but her late win in a small state likely did little to slow rival Barack Obama’s march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton won the overwhelmingly white state in a walk — by a landslide margin of 2-1, according to exit polls — and used the results to argue that Americans shouldn’t count her out yet.

So did it mean something or not?

That clearly depends on who you support.

With the exception of professional political analysts who strictly point to the delegate numbers so far and what is need to win nomination, many Clinton’s supporters say the big win is a potential game changer, while Clinton’s foes and Obama supporters insist it doesn’t change the total picture.

A look at weblog opinion gives a good snap-shot of this passionate, polarizing race — a race where each side’s reality is the other side’s denial.

Here’s a cross section of differing blog opinion on Clinton’s win and what it means:
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Join us for a quick tour of Saturday afternoon reading in case, like me, the weather is keeping you inside the house. As always, these are just a quick taste and I invite you to click through the selection of links for some interesting views offered up by some great writers.

The Booman Tribune wonders if Obama is facing even more challenges because the Secret Service is full of racists.

Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents.

If the Obama candidacy has done nothing else, it has exposed the raw bigotry towards non-white Americans that lies just under a thin layer of civility to which many white Americans point when they claim that racism and racial prejudice are no longer significant problems in our society. of course any non-white American could tell you otherwise, while laughing at anyone so naive as to believe racism is fading away.

The Lady Logician is concerned that the Republican party could be facing an uphill climb this fall unless a change in the message is crafted.

As we head toward the Convention and subsequent state central meeting, we need to decide what we as a party need to do to prevent what has the potential to be a slaughter of epic proportions. All options should be on the table as this election is quite simply going to be the difference between having an overwhelming DFL majority for the next generation or a viable competitive Republican Party. It really is do or die time.

Chris Bowers at Open Left asks readers to ponder how remarkable it is that the Democratic Party - a collection of “freaks and geeks” - has bonded so many different groups into a formidable force in American politics.

Whatever its flaws, the Democratic Party really is the party for “everyone else” in America. Virtually every ethnic, religious and sexual minority votes for Democrats by overwhelming margins. Vulnerable economic groups, such as single women, union members, and low-income voters also break for Democrats by overwhelming margins.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air takes the occasion of Jenna Bush’s wedding to ponder about media attitudes regarding such events and reminds us of some of the history of First Daughters walking down the aisle.

The idea that it takes “political capital” to stage a wedding for a child of the President is patently absurd. Who besides the most extreme lunatics would demand an end to someone’s wedding because their parent didn’t have political capital? Better yet, what credibility would Bush lose on policy after hosting a wedding reception for his daughter at the White House?

Avedon, at The Sideshow, thinks John McCain is way off base on how we should care for our veterans and has some news to share on the topic.

If you have some other favorite posts which we should all check out, use this as an open thread to point them out. I’ll add some of the good ones into this item later.

So now that the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are over — ending in split decision wins — who are the winners and losers in Tuesday’s primaries? Is it just Senator Barack Obama (who won North Carolina) or Senator Hillary Clinton (who narrowly won Indiana)?

Is it that clearcut? Here’s our take:

WINNERS:

Senator Barack Obama for winning a victory in North Carolina that went beyond the conventional media wisdom that was building — that he could lose there.

Senator Hillary Clinton for surviving by winning Indiana and keeping her candidacy alive, although some insist it is now on life support..and the batteries are almost dead.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his reprehensible “Operation Chaos” campaign to convince voters to use their precious right to vote to sandbag another party that appears to have worked in Indiana. Data suggests it had an impact.

Zogby polling for its final poll on North Carolina. Matt Drudge who yes indeed did call it earlier in the day (and we had our doubts about that report…).

LOSERS:

Senator Barack Obama for not being able to end Clinton’s candidacy with two solid wins (this could change if the final Indiana vote changes).

Senator Hillary Clinton for not just losing to Obama in North Carolina while aides talked about her gathering momentum, but for starting out Campaign 2008 with a good chunk of black voter support and ending the night with shockingly low black voter support (remember that at the beginning of the campaign Obama had a problem getting African Americans to vote for him and against a Clinton).

The Limbaugh “dittoheads” who felt the precious vote for which so many have died should be tossed away to sabotage another political party, as if democracy in a time of national crisis were some cutesy game (and we add in this category any Democrats who also played the same game crossing over in Republican primaries).

THE BIGGEST LOSERS:

The Superdelegates who will either have to act soon…or later…to put an end to the contest and face the possibility that, no matter what they decide, half of the committed Democrats won’t vote for the candidate they opposed (which some feel means they should be committed).

Political pandering: By most accounts of the talking heads and experts, Clinton’s embracing of the gas holiday tax and dismissive comment that she didn’t have to listen to economists didn’t do her much good and probably hurt her.

To read some excellent analytical live blogging on the night’s voting GO HERE.

What happens next? The media and weblogs are filled with tidbits about a night that could have been a “game changer,” but not what Clinton had in mind.

UPDATE: An interesting post from Talk Left’s Big Tent Democrat (one of the best pro-Clinton bloggers on the Internet) on what Clinton should do next:

My own view is she should run her campaign against John McCain. She will win West Virginia and Kentucky by huge margins.

She might even challenge Obama in Oregon.

What she should not do, imo, is run against Barack Obama. If there is a path to the nomination for her, and I doubt there is, it won’t come from attacking Obama now.

Some additional tidbits and excerpts:

–The Politico: Clinton cancels morning shows:

Tim Russert, a colleague reports, just said that Hillary Clinton canceled her scheduled appearances on the morning shows tomorrow.

It’s a sign of weakness she can ill afford at a moment when questions about whether she can continue are mounting.

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The latest Gallup Daily tracking poll is out and while it still shows Senator Barack Obama with a healthy lead over Senator Clinton in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, the numbers have also sparked a discussion about whether a pattern is emerging: Republican presumptive nominee Senator John McCain as a candidate who can’t get much above a certain number.

The boilerplate numbers, for those keeping track of the poll’s every twist and turn, are these:

Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton in national Democratic preferences for the nomination, 50% to 42%, in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from April 20-22.This marks the third straight day Obama has had a significant lead over Clinton, although he held a slightly higher 10 percentage point advantage in Tuesday’s report.

The latest three-day rolling average includes interviewing on Tuesday night, partially conducted as the returns of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary were coming in. However, the impact of Clinton’s 10-point win in that election on national Democratic preferences is not yet evident in the data.

With Obama currently leading Clinton nationally by eight points, it appears Pennsylvania is not a Democratic bellwether state. However, if the Clinton campaign is successful in using her solid Pennsylvania victory to argue she is the more electable candidate of the two in the fall, then she could start to close the gap with Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking over the next few days.

But some Internet pundits have noted another number: how McCain is shown as one point ahead of Obama, 46 to 45 percent and ahead of Clinton 47 to 46 percent. What is notable: he hasn’t moved all that much in many polls.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohen writes:

If McCain is getting a free ride, it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. He’s running no stronger against either candidate than he was before the Wright story, Bittergate, or the Bosnia controversy.

It’s possible McCain’s numbers are stagnant simply because Clinton and Obama soaking up all of the media attention. But there may be another explanation, one I know I’ve read elsewhere (maybe in a Gallup analysis, though I can’t find it now): That 45 percent figure represents a ceiling of his support.

After all, barring some outside shock to the political system, there is no reason to think McCain’s numbers will go up. People already have overwhelmingly positive feelings about him–stronger than about either of the Democratic candidates. They see him as a likeable, principled war hero whom they trust on national security. Very few realize that he has supported privatizing Social Security, that he opposes universal health insurance, that he supports free trade without qualification, and so on. Once the voters learn these things, at least some of them are likely to abandon him.

If anything, McCain has the look of an Internet stock circa 1999: Great numbers, lousy fundamentals.

Kevin Drum also sees this as reflecting a McCain Achilles heel:

McCain simply isn’t as strong a candidate as people seem to think he is. Factors working against him include Bush fatigue, a declining economy, his age, his need to pander heavily to the Christian right, his hawkishness in a year when the public isn’t feeling very hawkish, his history of flip flopping for transparently political reasons, and a portfolio of extremely unpopular positions (like privatizing Social Security) that Democrats can make a lot of hay with in the fall. What’s more — and go ahead, call me an optimist — I suspect that at some point there’s going to be a press backlash against McCain. His media image is a bubble, sustained by a sort of childlike faith, and once that faith starts to wobble — something that may already have started — the bubble is likely to pop. Before long, I suspect that a lot of reporters are going to start recognizing his faux openness as more faux than open.

Of course, this all assumes that Hillary Clinton decides not to be completely suicidal and take down the party in a huge ball of flames. But I don’t think she will. Even the Clintons have to bow to reality eventually.

The last statement is conventional wisdom…and we’ve already seen how accurate conventional wisdom has been this year….

Meanwhile, Steve Benen weighs in:

McCain, as a candidate, isn’t especially scary at all. He’s clumsy, unprincipled, arrogant, often belligerent, and usually confused. He was the best Republican candidate in the GOP field, but it was an awfully weak field.

But taking all of this into consideration, that’s all the more incentive to end the Democratic race and get the general election started. Like, now. Dems have a very powerful case to make against McCain, but they can’t make it while the party is divided in half, and they’re waiting until late August for a nominee.

McCain has high favorability ratings, nearly universal name ID, and the enduring love of every major news outlet in the country. The sooner Dems start making their case against McCain — which really isn’t that tough to make — Dems can position themselves for an incredibly successful, possibly even historic, year — at the top of the ballot on down.

The chances of this happening in a truncated, eight-week general election campaign, with a divided Democratic Party and a Republican nominee that will have a five-month head start, are considerably less. Cohn argues that it can come together for Dems anyway, so the party can just be patient and let all of this play out.

I’m not nearly as optimistic.

I agree with Benen.

If the Presidential election is viewed in a kind of vacuum with a Democrat in a normal year running against McCain, it could be argued that McCain isn’t getting much higher in the polls and could face problems once the Democrats get a nominee.

In fact, Robert Novak reports:

Obama’s difficulties and the prolongation of the Clinton-Obama confrontation have lifted Republicans from their slough of despondence to optimism about the presidential election. The transformation from deep pessimism to overriding optimism is such that McCain is privately warning supporters that once the nomination is decided and supporters of the losing Democratic candidate return to the fold, he will fall behind badly (though, McCain hopes, temporarily).

But what is most likely to happen? Unless there is some major development, Clinton will press her campaign — using as its tactic campaigning to raise Obama’s negatives so she can argue he is unelectable — at least into early June, or perhaps all the way to the convention. Many polls now report that Clinton and Obama supporters won’t vote for the other man/woman.

McCain is probably the strongest GOP candidate for 2008 because of his appeal to increasingly important independent swing voters. But some of the support is indeed “soft” and can be peeled away by a comprehensive Democratic campaign against him, particularly noting his many flip-flops on stands he originally took in his losing 2000 campaign. And — most assuredly — editors and reporters will cover anything that turns up about his background, or any of his political blunders.

Remember the unintentional press narrative that often emerges: the front runner rises, the front runner is solidly ahead, the front runner stumbles, the front runner is no longer the front runner and finally (in most but not all cases) the former front runner makes a dramatic comeback…and is the frontrunner.

The problem: media, public discourse, talk radio and blog oxygen is being sucked up by the increasingly ugly and personal Obama-Clinton campaign and the animosity of the camps of both of these candidates. Media attention often is determined by conventional wisdom and the idea of reader/viewer “interest.” No political story is as fascinating as the story of a political party that seemed to have it in the bag, ripping the bag wide open, releasing it’s contents and stomping on the bag.

All of the factors that could be cited that suggest McCain is a flawed candidate could be valid but must be looked at within this context: both Obama and Clinton are looking increasingly flawed as they fire political Uzis into each other. By COMPARISON, McCain is looking lofty and presidential and is not being painstakingly challenged.

McCain is solidifying his imagery the way he wants it to look..and doing it effectively. The two Democrats are working hard (and effectively) to tear down each others’ imagery…and they’re doing it effectively.

In any other year, McCain’s alleged polling ceiling would be highly significant. But viewed against the backdrop of what the two Clintons and Obama are doing to each other — and their party — McCain’s flaws may not matter much. Particularly if a sizable chunk of disappointed Clinton supporters or Obama supporters decide to teach the other candidate a lesson and stay home on Election Day.

On a related issue, be sure to read The Daily Kos’ Kos’ detailed analysis of Clinton and Obama electability.

FOOTNOTE: Who was the most accurate pollster in predicting the Pennsylvania vote? It was this pollster who contends Obama didn’t lose due to Clinton’s negativity, but his own political mistakes.

Senator Hillary Clinton got the Pennsylvania Democratic primary victory she needed so she could press the case that she should continue in the race because rival candidate Senator Barack Obama could not close the deal after vastly outspending her.

But her victory margin (a 10 percent margin, at this writing) most certainly means that the increasingly ugly battle for the Democratic party nomination will go well into June…and perhaps all the way to the convention.

Clinton ran a campaign of negativity unprecedented for a modern political primary. And the increasingly raw fissures in the Democratic party show no sign of receding: if anything, her victory means they will likely accentuate. Meanwhile, it is a fact: Obama has not been able to win over voting blocs that seemingly remain his stumbling blocks.

And what next? Obama is favored to win North Carolina. If so, will the Clinton camp argue that a win there doesn’t matter? And what about Indiana? It’s likely to become a prime battleground — perhaps one of the most important primaries of this looooooooong primary season. How did the Pennsylvania voting shape up? CBS News:

The Pennsylvania Democratic primary shared many of the same vote characteristics of other primary states this season - with Clinton winning her core base of union members, less educated and lower income voters and rural voters, and Obama winning voters with more education and income, and black voters.

What made Pennsylvania different, however, is the consistency of these traditional gaps as well as the appearance of some new divides. With intense media coverage of Obama’s recent statements regarding small town voters, and a consistent characterization of him as an elitist both by the media and by the campaigns of Clinton and John McCain, these pre-existing social divides grew larger in this first contest since the story broke.

In the primary Clinton received 71 percent of the vote from white members of labor union households, leading Obama by a striking 43 points. In contrast, Clinton won a smaller proportion of the white non-union vote, still besting Obama by 57 percent to 43 percent. This union vote is in stark contrast to the union vote in Ohio, one of the most recent and similar contests. In Ohio Clinton received 67 percent of the white union vote, and 62 percent of white non-union vote. This demonstrates a more polarized electorate by union status in Pennsylvania than Ohio.

This pattern of division repeats itself among other groups that have been important in past contests. White Democratic voters making less than $50,000 a year supported Clinton with 66 percent, compared to 58 percent support from those making over $50,000 a year. Obama received 24 percent and 42 percent respectively.

There was a 19 point preference gap between the less educated and the more educated in Pennsylvania primary voting. Clinton won 75 percent of the vote from white Democrats with a high school diploma or less - three times Obama’s vote among these voters - compared to 56 percent of those with more education.

Meanwhile, each candidate gave their own (predictable) spin on the election results. Clinton said the tide was turning and America deserved a President who wasn’t a quitter (TRANSLATION: She ain’t getting out until she runs out of money or feels it’s fruitless to stay in.) Obama noted that his campaign started way behind (TRANSLATION: He didn’t do as badly as it seemed he would do but it was not a good night for him). But the voting results really mean this:

“Hillary Clinton appears to have done what she needed to do in order to keep her campaign going on into Indiana and North Carolina and possibly well beyond that,” said CBSNews.com senior political editor Vaughn Ververs. “For Obama, this loss stems some of the sense of inevitability of his campaign and increases the pressure on him to regain the momentum.”

But now the Obama campaign faces a dilemma, as The Washington Post notes:

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