Toil and trouble.(2008)

'WHEN shall we three meet again?" asks the First Witch at the beginning of Macbeth. "In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" "When the hurlyburly's done," answers the Second Witch, "When the battle's lost and won." "That will be ere the set of sun," adds the Third Witch.

But not ere sunset anytime soon. On Little Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton won Ohio convincingly, Texas narrowly, and threw in Rhode Island for good measure. Obama's streak of victories, which reached twelve with the early-evening addition of Vermont, was decisively broken. After two and a half months of hyperactivity, the Democrats look forward to an eon of seven weeks until their next major vote, in Pennsylvania on April 22.

It will be said that the fickle media, bored with Obamaphilia and eager to write about a fight, began taking a tougher line on him so as to even the playing field. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, will point to the fact that they still lead in the delegate count, and that, while Hillary may catch him, it is nearly impossible for her to overtake him in the contests remaining. (The superdelegates and the problematic results of Florida and Michigan are another matter.)

But surely the major new weather pattern was the chill of actual scrutiny falling on Barack Obama. He had been running as what Richard Brookhiser once called in these pages "the Numinous Negro." He was a secular Christ child who offered to redeem us from racial anxiety, and therefore from political stasis. In the last week before Little Super ...