will.i.am, where.r.you?

Hillary Clinton wins Texas (according to CNN). Barack Obama now has to hope that headline writers run out of Comeback Kid cliches sometime before the start of April.

News cycles will be cruel to Obama, who has already suffered four days of drubbing without an effective response. Spinning your delegate lead isn't all that sexy. And now he can't even fire his economic adviser without inviting more criticism.

Will Wyoming and Mississippi kill the Clinton fire?

And don't forget Clinton's Florida card. If they re-vote there and she wins, could she take the delegate lead?

Who knew democracy could be such a pain in the ass?

Obama, Clinton and the long hard slog

John King at CNN just used his magic delegate board to show that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has any chance of winning a majority of delegates at this point - mathematical proof that superdelegates will decide this election. The only question is, what will sway them?

Money? Momentum? Fatigue?

Probably all of them. But only time, and tonight's results, will tell.

As of 5:11 p.m. PST, Obama has won Vermont, Clinton looks solid in Ohio, and Texas is a jump ball. Rhode Island is expected to go to Clinton, but no results are in.

National Journal's The Hotline has given us one of the inevitable story lines for tomorrow (unless Obama can pull it off in Ohio): Going negative works.

Prepare for a long and ugly brawl on the road to Pennsylvania.

Getting freaky*

The boys at Politico credit SNL and a deft Howard Wolfson for throwing Barack Obama under the media bus in the days leading up to today's Ohio and Texas primaries. But Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a different theory, and urges Politico Editor John Harris to go back to the book he wrote about how to win the White House in 2008, titled, creatively enough, "The Way to Win".

Here's the relevant passage from Greenwald's post: The reality is that the Clinton campaign has been complaining bitterly for months and months that the media has not subjected Obama to any real critical scrutiny. For the most part, that fell on deaf ears. The only thing that has changed over the past couple of weeks is that the right-wing noise machine, which now sees Obama as the likely Democratic nominee, began complaining just as bitterly that the media is "in the tank" for Obama. That is what moves them. As Harris himself wrote in his own book, it is Drudge -- not Howard Wolfson or SNL -- who rules their world.

*Speaking of freaky, Clinton must hate Anne Kornblut.

In case you care (I'm not sure I do) *Updated

I predict Hillary Clinton wins Ohio by 5-8 points, loses Texas by a hair and stays in the race with the argument that Pennsylvania looks a lot like Ohio, Florida could hold a do-over and enough superdelegates dig her style to put Barack Obama's inevitability in doubt.

She's just getting warmed up after all.

Obama needed a sharp stake and a hefty hammer to finish this one off. I don't think he brung it. In the last several days, Clinton has owned the news cycles, with her red phone ad, her campaign's leak of Obama in foreign garb, her re-ignition of a story that Obama's adviser told the Canadians he wasn't really serious about renegotiating Nafta, and the Tony Rezko trial starting today.

All of this comes on top of her successfully convincing the media that it had indeed developed a crush on Obama, which, as in real life, caused them to act out in strange ways to prove they don't really like him like that. *(Here's some proof of this phenomenon.)

Obama needs a stronger argument coming out of tomorrow's results than "she needed to win by a bigger margin." He appears to have New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on his side to ask Hillary to step aside, but he'll need stronger surrogates than that. After all, she has Bill Clinton mounting her defense and this is where he will be most effective, working the party insiders.

Mitt out

Mitt "The Mormon" Romney has suspended his run for president, but not before he again invoked the name of Ronald Reagan by comparing his decision to stand down to Reagan's loss in 1976. Thus, he promises a comeback after the Democrats trounce John McCain and make a bungle of a hostage rescue attempt.

I won't hold my breath.

I'll miss Romney, though I'm surprised he lasted this long. In many ways, he was the most genuine of all the candidates, bending to the will of voters at every opportunity, pandering without shame.

Now old-man McCain must climb that steep conservative mountain all alone - unless, of course, his old friend Huck finds a way to tag along (or McCain has a myocardial infarction). But Huck forgot that he needed Romney to stick around just as badly as McCain needed Huck to split the conservative vote. Now Huck's superfluous.

Barack Obama, who continues to revolutionize politics dollar-by-fund-raising-dollar, should be glad at all of this. The wind is at his back and Hillary Clinton has little room to go negative right now, and not a lot of cash on hand. Her only hope is that the writers' strike ends soon and all of Obama's young supporters get locked into the next season of Grey's Anatomy.