Hillary Clinton’s failure of momentum in Indiana and North Carolina last week as good as assured Barack Obama of the Democratic party’s nomination. Regardless of what happens in West Virginia tomorrow (Mrs Clinton expects an easy win), the question is no longer whether she has a chance of deflecting her rival. It is whether the manner of her exit will support or undermine him – and then what kind of contest the battle between Mr Obama and John McCain, the Republican nominee, will be.

The nomination fight has left the Democratic party divided. Mr Obama hardly swept the board in last week’s primaries: he won comfortably in a state he expected to win and held Mrs Clinton to a close result in the other. In other words, he triumphed only in denying her the big results she needed.

He made no inroads into her base of support. He merely shored up his own – among black people, the young and the urban middle class – and (against the run of recent poll results) stopped the rot elsewhere. It was enough to win and to calm the nerves of party leaders who were starting to question Mr Obama’s electability.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post your comments below.

The hole the US Democratic party is digging for itself just keeps getting deeper. In the past few days, after the grisly reappearance of Jeremiah Wright – the former friend who came not to praise Barack Obama but to bury him – Hillary Clinton’s standing in the polls has improved again. In Tuesday’s primaries, she is hoping for a comfortable win in Indiana and a close result in North Carolina, a dramatic change from just a month ago.

Meanwhile, Mr Obama continues to attract support from the unelected “super-delegates” who will almost certainly settle this thing. To understand why this is happening – why the super-delegates are choosing Mr Obama even as the wavering rank-and-file is having doubts – one must heed their growing alarm at the emerging prospect.

Despite Mrs Clinton’s recovery, Mr Obama will almost certainly end up with a majority of elected delegates and, unless the wheels come off completely, a majority of the popular vote (on most of the ways the Democratic party has provided for arriving at that figure).

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post your comments below.

I’m away for the next two weeks. Enjoy next Tuesday’s tie-breakers, and the tie-breaker in the following week. I’ll be back for all subsequent tie-breakers.

The New York Times reports that high gas prices are causing people to buy smaller cars.

Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede.

In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only one in every eight vehicles sold was a small car.

Colour me amazed. But it’s not too late to interrupt this alarming trend. Let’s try a gas-tax holiday. (One question about that proposal, by the way, I wish somebody would put to Hillary Clinton and John McCain: if it’s such a good idea, why do it just for the summer?)

At this, a twinge of homesickness. I never thought Boris would do it.

So, he has a killer instinct after all–or at least some limit to his forbearance. Obama’s response yesterday to Jeremiah Wright’s flurry of appearances, and especially to the pastor’s speech at the National Press Club on Monday, was pretty steely. He called what Wright had to say “a bunch of rants”. He said he was disgusted, and looked it. In contrast to his earlier and widely noted speech on race, in which he said he could never repudiate Wright the man, this time he just went ahead and did so.

We shall see whether this works. Wright isn’t going away. His NPC appearance showed that he is a narcissist as well as a racist demagogue, so there will be more. (So much, by the way, for taking his sermon snippets out of context. Wright has embarrassed not just Obama but also many moderate sympathisers who felt the reverend should be cut some slack. When asked about the government conspiracy to spread AIDS among the black population, he did not apologize for getting carried away; he affirmed that this was his view, saying that the government was capable of anything.) Perhaps Obama has now separated himself, but perhaps not.

It is worth noting that Wright did not say anything new on Monday; he did not say anything that Obama had not already heard. Plainly, Obama was angry not about what Wright said, but about the fact that he has chosen to keep on saying it–to the obvious detriment of Obama’s faltering campaign. Who wouldn’t be angry under those circumstances? But it is too late for Obama to say that the man’s views are so offensive in themselves that they put him outside the realm of decency. If that is true now, as Obama seemed to be saying yesterday, it was true weeks ago.

This is an inconsistency in Obama’s evolving position on Wright, though it might not matter. If the good pastor continues to ventilate, many people will continue to ask whether Obama was right ever to have given him the benefit of the doubt–and this is a fair question. On the other hand, giving an old friend the benefit of the doubt is an admirable and understandable trait, especially if you do not do it without limit and remain capable of seeing the error of your ways. As I say, we shall see.

Meanwhile, the gas-tax holiday. Was this a good issue for Obama to pick a fight on? I doubt it. With Clinton and McCain both agreeing on this admittedly stupid, pointless gimmick, Obama has set himself the task of explaining why a few months of slightly cheaper gas (let’s say, 9 cents a gallon cheaper–assuming that the incidence of the 18 cent tax is split 50-50 between producers and consumers) is such a bad thing. He is right on the substance: it solves nothing. But the problem is that his own larger ideas on the issue are no better.

The political punch in the way Clinton is spinning this proposal is that it demonizes the oil companies, second only in popularity in this country to demonizing the health insurers. It has to be a winner. And how can Obama object? He defers to no-one in his willingness, this present case excepted, to demonize both. His argument that the McCain/Clinton gas-tax idea is the usual Washington nonsense is true, but hard to square with his own litany on excess profits, wicked corporate interests, the gouging of consumers and the rest.

Up to now I had taken it for granted that Jeremiah Wright wanted Obama to win the nomination and the presidency–and that was why he had not been seen or heard from since the controversy over his sermons first blew up. Obama’s speech on race had seemed to repair much of the damage, and though his association with Wright remained a problem, things had moved on and it was not going to sink him. Now this:

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama’s presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright’s audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama’s vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan, confirmed that Wright’s security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. “He didn’t distance himself,” Wright announced. “He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.”

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, “We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” The minister continued: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

I think one can imagine how delighted Obama must have been to read accounts of this appearance. What I would love to know, though, is what Wright and those cheering leaders of the black community are thinking. The obvious theory is that Wright must want Obama to lose, and thus affirm the pastor’s account of all that is sick about the country: God damn America, too bigoted a nation to elect a black man president. If that is what he is doing, and he keeps it up, he may yet get his way.

Last week’s vote in Pennsylvania was an even worse result for the Democratic party than is widely supposed. Hillary Clinton’s impressive victory will sustsain her campaign through all the remaining presidential primaries, even if Barack Obama bounces back on May 6 in Indiana and North Carolina. At the same time, though, Mr Obama’s campaign did not collapse. Far from it: he made big inroads into the lead that Mrs Clinton once had in the state.

Therein lies the problem. The result in Pennsylvania does not license the party’s “super-delegates” to get behind Mrs Clinton and overrule Mr Obama’s unassailable lead in elected delegates. Pennsylvania was a calamity because it resuscitated Mrs Clinton without coming close to crippling Mr Obama.

Of course, prolonging the ill-tempered battle between Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton hurts the Democrats and helps John McCain, the Republican candidate. For the Democrats, this is bad enough – but it is not the half of it. When this race is over, there will be a loser with ample reason, in either case, to challenge the winner’s legitimacy. The prolonging of the campaign is not the main problem. The greater danger for the Democrats comes at the termination of an exquisitely close race – in a bitterly divisive outcome, whoever prevails, regardless of whether it happens sooner or later.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post your comments below.

The contrasting characters (this is not just a matter of “style”) of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been prominently on display since the Pennsylvania results came in. Her killer instinct is so much to the fore that it often seems to be her only instinct. It is both her greatest strength (she never quits) and her greatest weakness (she targets, rather than wishing to talk to, those she disagrees with). With Obama, the opposite seems true: his killer instinct seems not just suppressed but entirely absent. Again, this is both a strength (his appealing consensus-seeking temperament) and a weakness (he prefers to roll with the punches rather than striking back).

Today Hillary was telling an audience in Indiana that she now leads in the popular vote for the Democratic nomination. This is true only if you include both Florida and Michigan–where Obama was not even on the ballot. Her comments made no concession to this fact. She is ahead on the least plausible measure of the popular vote, and behind on the others. No problem: that will serve. And here is another instance glimpsed today. She attacked Obama for allowing that John McCain would at least be a better president than George Bush. No, she insisted. McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years: he is every bit as bad as Bush. Never give the enemy an inch, is her creed. In that single comment she attacked both Obama and McCain–unfairly, in both cases, but effectively.

Meanwhile, what was Obama saying? He was telling an audience in Indiana what a good race Hillary had fought in Pennsylvania, what a strong candidate she was, and how he had no doubt that the Democratic party would rally round whoever was nominated. This was beyond gracious: these were sentences from a concession speech. It required the New York Times, in its oddly splenetic editorial, to attack Hillary for fighting a negative campaign. (When they endorsed her, were they expecting the Clintons to take the high road?) Her actual opponent was far kinder.

If Hillary could give Obama some of her taste for the jugular–she has so much to spare–they would both be better candidates.

You have to admire Hillary’s determination. Being the underdog brings out the best in her–and it either neutralises or makes forgivable the less appealing aspects of her campaign and character.

She remains the underdog. Her victory in Pennsylvania was solid without being startling. The margin was exactly what was required to make it certain that she would stay in the race–yet without much altering the arithmetic that so strongly favours Obama. Her ten-point advantage is less than she needed to get on track to overturn Obama’s lead in the Democratic popular vote (although, admittedly, this depends on how you measure it); his lead in pledged delegates was secure in any case. It is not enough, either, to persuade wavering superdelegates that the Obama campaign is failing–or at any rate, failing so badly that they could override a pledged-delegate lead without tearing the party to pieces. Having said all that, once again she arrested his momentum, and raised questions about his ability to close the deal.

He can argue that he came through the Wright and Bittergate affairs unscathed. His overall result in Pennsylvania was close to his performance in Ohio, a demographically similar state, which voted before those recent setbacks. Indeed, he made big inroads on Hillary’s early lead. One wonders whether, if not for Bittergate, he would have held her to a closer result, and maybe even won–in which case it would all have been over. But he did not, and, money permitting, this result most likely gives Hillary enough momentum to keep going through all the remaining primaries.

What kind of campaign will she fight from now on? As I say, she will most likely end up losing, but what matters for the party’s electoral prospects in November is the manner of her losing. She may increase the intensity of her attacks on Obama–which puts her party as well as her own reputation at risk. Or perhaps she will strike a more positive note, calculating that a negative assault does not meaningfully improve her chances. You could argue that her best hope now is to stay viable as a candidate and pray that Obama makes some terrible error, and she does not need to go negative to do that. It will be interesting to see whether Hillary is capable of that kind of tactical compromise–whether she can do anything but fight all out, whatever it takes.