Indiana and North Carolina Primaries Spark Usual Nonsense From Media

MSNBC asks the hopeful question whether today's primaries will end the race for the Democrat Party nomination and that the real story will be the race for both Obama and Clinton to woo the superdelegates ahead of the convention in Denver. I'm here to say that it will do no such thing.

Is today the last day on the campaign trail? Sure, there are six more contests beyond these two in Indiana and North Carolina. But after today, there will be more undeclared superdelegates (264) and more disputed delegates (366 in Florida and Michigan) for the campaigns to fight over than there will be delegates earned in the remaining primaries (217). Indeed, there's an argument to be made that after today, there are more delegates to be had INSIDE THE BELTWAY than out on the trail. So for all intents and purposes, today is the last shopping day of the primary season for the two Dems to impress the superdelegates on their issues.

Neither candidate will score the knockout blow today, and neither candidate will gain enough votes - either the popular tally or the delegates - to win the nomination or make a clear case that they've won the right to represent the party.

And that situation will repeat itself in the remaining elections before the convention, which means that the situation is going to a brokered convention regardless of the outcome - a situation that has been developing ever since Super Tuesday.

Obama continues to show that he can't win the big states, while Hillary continues to do poorly everywhere else.

It will get very ugly in Denver at the convention; mark my words.

UPDATE:
As I expected, North Carolina went to Obama and Clinton won Indiana. How does this result change anything? It doesn't. Onwards to the convention people and a brokered mess where back door deals will mean that one candidate's supporters will find themselves cast aside as the party is torn asunder by competing partisan hacks.

Of course, none of this will change the need for both parties to spin the results to their advantage. It's what the candidates pay their consultants millions of dollars to do. Hillary tried to play up that she was going to lose big in North Carolina so that when the results showed an improvement over her polling data, it will appear as though she did better than expected when in reality the results were entirely predictable. The same goes with Indiana where Obama was trying to manage expectations of losing yet another big state to Clinton.

The fact is that both candidates knew that they were going to win those states and planned their victory celebrations well in advance - Obama was going to celebrate in North Carolina while Clinton will be spending the night in Indiana.