With her candidacy on the line yet again, Hillary Rodham Clinton survived the Pennsylvania primary, doing well enough to claim the right to remain in the contest for at least a few more weeks.
Not only did she hold off Barack Obama and his multimillion-dollar media campaign, but she appeared to have quieted, at least for the moment, the voices of those who would like to see her depart the stage as soon as possible.
As a result, there's likely to be no immediate stampede to endorse the Illinois senator by the party's 300 or so undeclared superdelegates - the people who will determine the nominee.
Most of those superdelegates will wait to see what happens in the weeks to come, to see whether Obama can recapture the magic and whether Clinton's financially strapped campaign can raise enough money to continue.
They will try, too, to gauge Obama's ability to stand up to Republican John McCain in the fall, particularly in big swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, and to assess the seriousness of the doubts on that score raised by Clinton in the last few weeks.
Increasingly, her message has been simple and blunt: I can beat McCain. He can't.
But time is running out for Clinton. And Obama, even in defeat, remains in much the stronger position to win the presidential nomination.
For his campaign, though, the results yesterday had a disturbingly familiar feel to them, raising anew questions about his ability to close the deal with voters.
Two weeks ago, he was gaining ground on Clinton in Pennsylvania and seemed, perhaps, on the way to a knockout victory that would have ended the race.
Then he stumbled, caught up in the flap over his comments about "bitter" small-town Pennsylvanians and slowed by his widely panned performance during the debate in Philadelphia.
So a familiar pattern was repeated.
Once again, the late-deciding voters - those who had enough interest in Obama not to have committed to his rival early on - broke overwhelmingly for Clinton, for her familiarity and her experience.
Twice before, in New Hampshire on Jan. 8 and Texas on March 4, Obama had been in position to put Clinton away and failed. He came up short again last night.
Even the conventional wisdom that Obama is the near-inevitable nominee of his party couldn't help him get it done. Nor could the notion that the good of the party as a whole might be well-served by ending the nomination fight sooner rather than later.
In addition, Obama was unable to break into Clinton's demographic strongholds.
She beat him again among older voters, whites, women, Catholics, and people without college degrees. He beat her among the young, the black, and the better-educated, carrying only a few counties.
Even so, one must be careful not to overstate the impact of Clinton's victory yesterday.
For her, the obstacles remain daunting. She continues to trail Obama in delegates won, in the overall popular vote - she made only modest dents in both yesterday - and in the national polls. The Gallup national-tracking poll has Obama ahead by 10 percentage points.
Only nine contests remain on the calendar, with 408 pledged delegates at stake. To catch Obama, she must win nearly two-thirds of them, a virtual impossibility.
All of those factors are likely to work against the Clinton campaign's ability to raise additional funds.
To be sure, she has won a lot of states this year in which she was heavily outspent, including Pennsylvania. But she needs a healthy injection of campaign cash simply to keep going.
Last night, while claiming victory in Philadelphia, she asked her supporters to dig into their pockets, "because the future of this campaign is in your hands." Her redesigned Web site asked for contributions as small as $5.
Obama has plenty of money in the bank and the proven ability to raise more. As of April 1, he had $42 million in the bank. She had $9.3 million - and $10.3 million in debt.
In the end, Pennsylvania, after occupying the spotlight for so long, didn't decide anything - other than that the race won't be over for a while. That may not be a good thing for the Democrats.
Earlier this year, Democratic voters seemed enthralled with both candidates. There was a feeling that there was something special about both of them and about the competition itself.
But in the six weeks leading up to Pennsylvania, the two of them started to look more ordinary, more like conventional politicians. And so did this prolonged race, which Clinton has described as "the longest job interview anyone could imagine."
Gone was much of the grand talk of the ability to deliver profound change. In its place were the old reliables of American politics, the attack ads and the back-and-forth about gaffes, misstatements and past associations.
So Pennsylvania, after all the town halls, the drop-bys, and $16 million of television commercials, turned out not to resolve anything.
It only succeeded in raising the stakes for the next events, Indiana and North Carolina, which are only two weeks away and which, combined, offer more convention delegates than Pennsylvania.
Two more weeks of bitter scuffling loom. If those two weeks don't produce a resolution, and it may take Obama victories in both states, the Democratic Party will have a certified mess on its hands.
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