"I feel good about where we are, David Axelrod said early Wednesday morning with a straight face. Obama's chief strategist can't really mean that. Yes, his man has won 28 primaries and caucuses, compared with 13 for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Yes, Obama has won a very narrow majority of votes cast-leading by perhaps 300,000 or so out of 25 million cast. Yes, he has what may well be an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates.

Yes, but. Now Obama faces a fight all the way to Denver. He called Hillary to offer congratulations, and the two of them must have talked about how they want to keep the next couple of months civil. But I can't imagine that their campaigns will be able to honor whatever agreement they made.

If you are a movement candidate, and Obama is, you have to keep the movement going. And though he is ahead in delegates, his momentum has slowed to a crawl. He has a chance to revive it in Wyoming this weekend and Mississippi next week-both likely Obama victories.

But Pennsylvania becomes the next station of the cross. Obama starts way behind there, but he may yet have a chance to win it. I'll give you one reason why: my hometown of Pittsburgh. It's long since ceased to be a steel town. There isn’t a single mill left in the city. It is a big college town, and a hospital-and-health care city. The Philadelphia area has changed too, more upscale, educated and approachable by Obama.

I think we can all see how the night is ending. The confetti is coming down in Columbus, and Hillary Clinton is on to Pennsylvania. As a Pennsylvanian--Pittsburgher, actually--I am happy to have a chance to do more reporting on my state. But I am not sure the Democratic Party is going to like what happens from here on. "We're just getting started," Hillary declared in her Ohio victory speech. Translation: rough road ahead.

This race is going all the way to Denver, to the Democratic convention. There will be arguing, vicious arguing, about what to do with Florida and Michigan. What if they hold second events--do-overs--in June? What if Hillary doubles down on her criticism of Barack Obama's readiness for office?

I was just talking to one of Obama's top advisers, and he was picking through what happened Tuesday night. This is a hard-eyed, unsentimental guy, and he worried aloud that Obama is a prize fighter who can’t--or won’t--deliver the knockout punch. "Barack wants to win it the way he wants to--with some class--otherwise, what's the point?" But Hillary just wants to win, and is willing to be as nasty as it takes.

According to this source, the Clinton campaign's "red phone" ad worked in Texas. And in Ohio, the Clinton campaign was able to fudge the trade issue by focusing on the errant, pro-NAFTA comments of one of Obama's aides. The comments allowed Clinton to accuse Obama of being two-faced about the unpopular trade agreement. "We stumbled a couple of times over the last few days and it cost us," he said.

Here is the danger for Obama: a campaign based initially on an anti-war speech, and based also on younger voters who see him as a movement, and on a powerful yet vague critique of the "system," has yet to win over rank-and-file, working-class white Americans to his side. He also has not made the sale to the fastest-growing minority group, Latinos, who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary in Texas and elsewhere.

Hillary has found her voice as the meat-and-potatoes gal of the old school, and it still has potent appeal to Democratic voters. And it may have more and more as the economy falls into what could be a deep recession.

Despite the delegate math working against Clinton, this ain't over by a longshot. 

I'm watching Sen. John McCain give what amounts to his nomination acceptance speech. He is talking about service, about America as the last best hope of mankind, about fighting the Taliban and his pride in the decision to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein. He wants to win the battle for the hearts and minds of Islam. He wants to defend free-trade treaties and improve education. He promises lower taxes and regulation. He promises an energy policy that relies on alternative sources. "We don't hide from history, we make history," McCain said.

There was no talk of a 100-year war in Iraq, but a challenge to the Democrats to explain how they would end it without producing a genocidal ethnic cleansing. In short, he sounds presidential, impressively so.

He says how he will run: travel the country and hold town halls everywhere. It is who he is and what he does. He even manages to portray himself as a man who eschews ambition, even though he has been running for president of the United States.

I have to admit--I am duty bound to admit--that I have underestimated McCain time and again. I didn’t think he had the muscle or the message to defeat then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000, but McCain nearly pulled off a miracle. I thought he was yesterday's news last fall, when his 2008 campaign was going nowhere. Even after his repeat miracle in New Hampshire, I was not convinced that he could get from there to here.

McCain is no angel, God knows. But he is a fighter, and a winner, and he is going to be harder for the Democrats to beat than they may think. Don't let his age distract you. He has more zest for battle in him then men half his age. And he has a message: I am a soldier at heart, not a politician.

Let's see who salutes.

There is no more charming weathervane in Democratic politics than New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. There is no bet he won't cover. Last weekend, he made some public comments on the presidential race. He stated the obvious: that whoever has the delegate lead as of this Wednesday morning would be the likely nominee. Well, duh.

The Obama campaign has been claiming that Richardson was about to endorse their man. In fact, after talking a few minutes ago to Richardson's closest political confidant, I can say that that is not true. It wasn't true and isn't true.

Especially now. Richardson is watching TV like the rest of us, and caging exit polls like the rest of us, and he can see the possibility that Sen. Hillary Clinton may win as many as three out of four states tonight.

So the weathervane is moving.

Mike Stratton, Richardson's buddy, told me how his friend would deal with the results--and that is emblematic of party leaders as a whole, I think. If Hillary wins both Ohio and Texas, the race will be wide open, and the leadership will keep a hands-off stance, making no move to try to shut down the race.

If Hillary loses both, Richardson won't necessarily endorse Obama immediately, but he will support an effort to get the New York senator to stand down.

If the Ohio-Texas results are split, Richardson believes that Hillary will have a hard time arguing that she should continue.

Hillary does have one case to make: that she, ironically, is not the "elite" candidate, that she represents white working women, Latinos and blue-color workers. It is the old bedrock of the Democratic Party, and Obama has to answer the question of why he can't win them over in this presidential race.

Chris Matthews just made fun of me on "Hardball"--it wouldn't be the first time!--for saying that we won't know how dire, how hopeless, Sen. Hillary Clinton's situation is until later tonight. We'll know it when we see it, I said. What are you, the Supreme Court? Chris asked with justifiable glee.

But the fact is, after all of the money and message and machinations, the fate of the Clinton campaign rests depends not just on the vote totals or delegates won per se, but on how the whole thing feels by, say, midnight.

It's no longer a question of what Hillary herself thinks-she wants to stay for the duration, a close friend of hers tells me-but whether and when the leaders of the Democratic Party unite, publicly and privately, to tell her to get out if she wants to have a future leadership role in her own party.

As my colleague Jon Alter convincing showed today-calculator in hand-there is just no way, barring some kind of cataclysmic event, that Clinton can overtake Sen. Barack Obama in pledged delegates. Obama won’t have enough of them to clinch the nomination on that basis alone, but she can’t catch him.

So Clinton's only chance rests with winning over party elders, and the 794 superdelegates who are free to vote for whomever they choose regardless of the primary or caucus results in their own state. By my count, about 350 of them remain up for grabs.

But she needs to do more than just eke out a victory or two tonight to make the claim that Obama is somehow unelectable. Instead of having won 11 in a row, he will have won, say, 13 out of the last 15 events. Not exactly a collapse.

Obama almost certainly will win Vermont, the home of Ben and Jerry. So that means Hillary essentially has to sweep the rest to fully forestall a move by party leaders to tell her to quit.

I have spent a good part of the day listening to dueling conference calls from the Clinton and Obama camps. Howard Dean is right in what he just said to Chris on Hardball. So far, the "attacks" are a "tea party" compared with what is to come.

But if Clinton continues to the next stage-if the results tonight allow her to fend off those telling her to quit-the next round is going to be a lot nastier. It's going to get into Obama's South Side Chicago roots; into some of the wilder statements of his longtime minister, Jeremiah Wright; and into the not-so-sly raising of doubts about Obama's religious beliefs.

Does Hillary really want to go there? Maybe not, which is why I think some of her own supporters (and maybe even some of her own campaign aides) would just as soon that this thing end tonight.

Here lieth the campaign of Mitt Romney, victim of the mistaken belief that the only way to succeed in national Republican politics was to turn yourself into something you are not. Or maybe the campaign revealed what his closest friends never imaged him to be. They thought he was a decent classy guy. But maybe he really is a soulless throat-cutter who would do and say anything to win.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was a good fellow who didn't know enough about national politics and listened to people who gave him bad, cynical advice.

Sen. John McCain was in a good position before; now it's hard to imagine that he won't wrap up the nomination in the next week or two. His lone remaining serious opponent, Mike Huckabee, has exceeded expectations, but expecting him to be able to unhorse McCain is perhaps expecting too much.

I have covered a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can't think of one that so lost its way-so expensively-as that of the former governor of Massachusetts. A board room and business favorite, a man with a Midas managerial touch, he was widely admired and even beloved. But he was a Republican of an old moderate school-that of his own father-and, like George W. Bush, Romney the Younger decided that he had to jettison all that he was to become something that he was not.

And so it was that this square peg spent perhaps $80 million-including at least $30 million of his own money-trying to pound himself into a round hole. It didn't work. The irony of his failed campaign: if he had just stuck to selling his managerial mettle, he might well have won the nomination, given the way the country's economic anxieties have become voters' number one concern.

Read the rest here.