Primary Colors

Well, the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are over, and Hillary Clinton is just about out of running room.

What she needed to convince the all important superdelegates to rally to her was a decisive win in Indiana and no more than a single digit loss in North Carolina. She didn't get it.

Instead she ended up with a narrow 51-49 victory in Indiana and the losing end of a
56-42 rout in North Carolina.

The demograpics pretty much mirrored the divide in the Democratic party. In North Carolina, blacks make up 35% of the Democrat's electorate, and Obamas got 91% of that vote, with only 7% for Senator Clinton.She would have had to get over 70% of the white vote to compete with that, and she came nowhere close. 61% of whites voted for her in North Carolina, with 37% for Obama.

In Indiana, Clinton won by a mere 23,000 votes. The difference for her was that black voters make up only 18% of the Democratic electorate in Indiana. Obama won 90% of them, while Clinton won 60% of white votes.There may also have been some creative accounting in overwhelmingly black Lake County and Gary,right next door to Chicago. The mayor Rudy Clay, a conspicuous Obama backer predicted a `shocker'...and there was an unusually high percentage of absentee ballots and the votes were counted suspiciously late.

Another interesting factor is that both states are fairly solid Republican states and have very low Hispanic populations..a group which has not exactly embraced Barack Obama

It's a fascinating scenario, where Hillary likely can't get nominated but Barack Obama faces major difficulties in getting elected.

It remains to be seen whether John McCain is going to be able to take advantage of Barack Obama's weaknesses. To do that, he will have to be ruthless in exposing those weaknesses, and pick a great running mate.

And, as I said a long time ago, he and any other Republicans who plan on getting elected in `08 are going to have to run agianst George W. Bush, in varying degrees.

As for Hillary, she's going to come under increasing pressure to drop out of the race. Aside from the loss of momentum, her campaign is broke..she had to lend it an additional $6.4 milion out of her own pocket to keep things going, which added to the $5 million she previously anted up puts her personal stake at $11.4 million.

There are likely negotiations going on under the radar between the two campaigns about what it would take for Hillary to pull out now, and repaying some of that money might end up being one of the deal points.