Over Not Out.(The Talk of the Town)(Democratic presidential nomination)

When the polls closed in Indiana and North Carolina last Tuesday evening, a lot of Barack Obama supporters braced themselves for bad news. Their candidate had just gone through a harrowing month, divided neatly in two by his thumping in the Pennsylvania primary. He had been repeatedly gored by a pair of old bulls, his ex-President and his ex-pastor, both of them maddened by his success and aggrieved by his presumption. He had been singed in a media bonfire sparked by trivia and fanned into flame by culture-war-mongering. His remark about the bitterness of displaced workers supposedly made him an elitist; his glancing acquaintance with a sixty-something ex-Weatherman supposedly made him a friend of terrorists. On the stump, he seemed subdued, wearied by the bumpy last stage of the long, astonishing ascent he began fifteen months ago, when he set out to do battle with one of the most famous women in the world, whose arsenal included a huge war chest, backed by a fund-raising apparatus unparalleled in Democratic politics; the support of the great majority of Democratic officeholders ready to declare a preference; and, as her chief surrogate, the most successful Democratic politician of the past forty years. Although North Carolina had long been seen as a lock for Obama, on account of its large African-American population, there were late polls that put him and Hillary Clinton within the margin of error; Indiana seemed out of reach, according to the polls, which in any case had a record of overestimating his strength.

Losing both states probably wouldn't have cost Obama the nomination, but it would have meant, at a minimum, a brutal, ugly, down-to-the-wire endgame guaranteed to leave the ultimate winner seriously, perhaps fatally, weakened. So when the returns started coming in, showing an Obama landslide in North Carolina and a shrinking Clinton lead in Indiana, Obama supporters looked at one another in happy wonderment. As Clinton's margin in Indiana slipped below twenty thousand, Tim Russert, of NBC, went on the air to say, bluntly, "We now know who the Democratic nominee's going to be, and no one's going to dispute it." Just after dawn, ABC's George Stephanopoulos decreed, "This nomination fight is over." On CBS, Bob Schieffer brought the networks to unanimity. "Basically," he said, "this race is over." And the New York Post hit the streets with cruel tabloid succinctness: a picture of the home-state senator over a single word--"TOAST!"--in block letters three inches high.

When and where, it is not too soon to ask, did she go wrong? Well, here's one answer: eight years ago, in New York. If she had chosen, instead, to move to Illinois, where her accent is familiar and her connections deep (Chicago's her home town, after all), she could have settled in and sought her Senate seat there, in 2004. She didn't do that, presumably for reasons both marital (Bill's not really a Second City kind of guy) and political (she would have had to run for President as a first-term senator rather than as a reelected one). But Barack Obama would still be a local or regional up-and-comer and, most likely, a Hillary supporter. Here's another: five and a half years ago, in Washington. If she had opposed authorizing the Iraq war, the activists--grassroots and netroots--might have mobilized for her rather than against her. She might have cruised to the nomination, and the Democratic Party might now be basking in the warm glow of being about to make history by electing the first woman President.

It is surely beyond galling for Hillary Clinton to find herself losing to a freshman senator who is young ...