Barack Obama may not have technically won Indiana Tuesday night, but by holding Hillary Clinton to a whisker-thin 11,000-vote margin, he administered the final blow to her tiny hopes of victory. Indiana did indeed turn out to be the “tie breaker."
Even before North Carolina and Indiana, the delegate math made it almost impossible to deny Obama the Democratic nomination. But Clinton’s Pennsylvania victory, her constant attacks, and Reverend Wright’s re-emergence into the campaign had some Democrats feeling queasy.
Obama’s 14 percent landslide in North Carolina did much to reassure them that he was not mortally damaged by the weeks of negative attacks. But it was when the numbers narrowed in Indiana that you could feel the cold winds shift, as if a political warm-front had swept in, bringing with it the breezes of victory. The pundits' tone morphed from “big night for Hillary” to Tim Russert’s assertion that “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it.”
