The Year that Wasn’t….By Victor Davis Hanson

On the Democratic side, Clinton was stopped cold — but still has yet to be finished off by Obama. Now we can expect months more of infighting. As the Democrats raise tens of millions to destroy themselves, McCain can only sit back and smile. With Obama the likely nominee, we can also expect to hear more from, and about, his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Reporters no doubt are scanning Rev. Wright’s massive corpus of texts and DVDs for more hate speech. Even before the Wright controversy, the Democratic vote had been split heavily along racial lines — whites for Clinton, blacks for Obama — in certain states, including the all-important Ohio. That’s not a good sign for a party that’s supposed to be a model of racial transcendence.Clinton will weaken Obama for months to come. There is no reason to believe the former front-runner will quit the Democratic race soon, even though Obama has an all-but-insurmountable delegate lead.

Clinton has momentum and should win sizably in Pennsylvania later this month. Millions want to vote for her in the remaining primaries. By convention time, she could even end up with a slight lead in the aggregate popular vote.

Clinton has also so far won all the big states that will be in play in the general election. She knows the superdelegates were created precisely for a year like this, and so will argue that these Democratic pros are there to check the exuberance of a liberal electorate that might actually nominate someone untested like Obama. Had Clinton run under Republican primary rules, her wins would have already sealed for her the nomination.

National Review