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WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton won huge in West Virginia yesterday, and it didn't mean a thing.
Early returns showed the New York senator leading Barack Obama by 2-to-1 margins, the sort of blowout that, had this been an earlier contest, could have changed the narrative of the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"After tonight's tremendous victory here in West Virginia, it's clear that the pundits declaring this race over have it all wrong," the New York senator told supporters.
"We've proved conventional wisdom wrong time and again in this race. We did it again tonight in West Virginia. Let's keep going," she said.
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But Mr. Obama had long since conceded the state to Ms. Clinton. West Virginia is dominated, like few others, by rural, less-affluent white voters - her kind of people.
And this campaign's narrative has already been written by both the powerful pundits of the U.S. media she railed against, and by the leadership of the Democratic Party itself.
As if to reinforce the story line, Mr. Obama spent last night in Missouri, a key swing state that he will need to win in the general election in November.
"This is a state where we will compete to win when I am the Democratic nominee for president," he promised his typically ecstatic supporters at a campaign rally in Cape Girareau.
Today, he's meeting factory workers in Michigan, leaving Ms. Clinton to wage a one-person campaign for Kentucky, Puerto Rico, North Dakota and Montana. She can have them all - well maybe not quite all - as far as he's concerned, so long as he picks up Oregon next Tuesday.
Ms. Clinton and her supporters have every good reason to be infuriated by the growing indifference of the power centres in the party and media toward her campaign.
Over the past two months and a bit, she has won primaries in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana and now West Virginia.
Mr. Obama, in that time, won only North Carolina. But that was enough. With his lead in pledged delegates, states won and popular vote, a strong showing last week was sufficient for the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to start to move.
Over the past week, Mr. Obama picked up a net increase of 28 of these party elders - equal to all the pledged delegates from West Virginia - reversing Ms. Clinton's lead and sealing, in the minds of most observers, the nomination.
"This race, I believe, is over," former Democratic National Committee chair Roy Romer told reporters. "There is a time [when] we need to end it and direct ourselves to the general election. I think that time is now."
Ms. Clinton has one straw to cling to. The steady trickle of superdelegates to Mr. Obama is hardly a flood. There are still more than 200 fence-sitting supers. Her hope, thin as it is, is that epochal wins in West Virginia yesterday and Kentucky next week, along with a stronger-than-expected showing in Oregon, will persuade the remaining wavering superdelegates to move en masse to her side.
Unfortunately, there isn't an observer to be found outside the Clinton camp who gives this scenario a ghost of a chance.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been using the months since the nomination to build his team, raise money and campaign in regions where he hopes to expand the Republican vote in November.
Mr. Obama is retooling his message and his campaign strategy to focus on the economic concerns of those white down-market voters who thus far have resisted his appeal.
The McCain-Obama matchup, which promises to be epic, is under way, while Hillary Clinton tries to convince everyone that she's still standing.
