Tide not turning

Despite Hillary Clinton's assertion that "the tide is turning" in the Democratic presidential primary campaign, the tide is decidedly unchanged.

What was before Pennsylvania continues to be after Pennsylvania.

Clinton beat Obama yesterday in Pennsylvania by a 10-point margin - enough to claim a "decisive" victory, but short of the margin she needed to signal to superdelegates, voters and the media that the dynamics of the race had fundamentally shifted.

Indeed, it's just the opposite. The election results prove that neither candidate has found a way to break free of the status quo. This was Ohio redux.

In other words, Clinton is no closer to discovering the discrete mathematics needed to overtake Obama and has done little to convince superdelegates to go against the tide of the delegate count. At the same time, Obama needed to find a way to knock her out and he failed. He still has a few more chances to do that.

One other thing, the real threat to Obama if he goes on to the general election isn't a divided Democratic Party, it's a rising tide of anti-Obama sentiments in rural and working-class America, pushed by and large by pro-Clinton forces.

A friend of mine who was covering the non-voters in Pennsylvania said he was surprised at the number of people who truly fear Obama is unAmerican, a foreigner or Muslim. Clinton's negative numbers might be soaring because of her campaign tactics, but those kind of negatives wear off. If you can convince a healthy segment of the electorate that a candidate is The Other, it's extremely difficult to turn their minds around.