Flight to the feckless.(2008 II)

BARACK OBAMA'S solid win in Wisconsin--a potential battleground state in the fall--coupled with his favorite-son victory in Hawaii takes him one step nearer the Democratic nomination. It is increasingly hard to see how Hillary Clinton can catch up. She would need convincing victories in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the three remaining big states, but every Obama win in a small state disheartens her supporters and peels off the undecided. Conventional wisdom held that the super-delegates--chosen not by voters or caucus goers, but by virtue of their status as party machers--were her strategic reserve. That seems so early-February. What politician will want to defy his constituents? Can Democrats, who have spent the last seven years steaming over Bush v. Gore, accept any legitimacy other than nose-counting? The Clintonites make a plebiscitary argument of their own when they ask to count the votes of Florida and Michigan, states penalized for jumping ahead in the primary calendar, which Mrs. Clinton contested anyway. This would be such a blatant rule change that they have made little headway.

The Democratic party is caught in a spasm. The endorphin rush of Obama supporters--some of whom tend to faint at his appearances--is so marked that it has drawn parodists (journalist Timothy Noah keeps an online "Obama Messiah Watch"). But the phenomenon marches on. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," as Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, "but to be young was very heaven!" Or young at heart.

Some soft spots have shown in the new frontrunner though. The paragraph that appeared in ...