Searching for Winners

USA Today: "McCain's victory celebration was tempered a bit by warning signs that he has yet to win over Republican partisans and the party's most conservative voters -- many of whom remain suspicious of his maverick past on such issues as taxes and immigration. And he could face a bitter endgame with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as conservative critics scramble to deny the Arizona senator the presidential nomination."

Politico: "By winning critical contested strongholds in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and -- most important -- California, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York showed big-state muscle and remained the putative leader. Decisive red-state victories in Oklahoma and Tennessee bolstered her assertions of electability. But Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois proved the breadth of his national appeal and national organization in winning six more primaries and caucuses than his rival."

Salon's Walter Shapiro: "Never before in the long history of presidential politics have so many voters in so many states gone to the polls and their caucus sites on the same day -- and decided so little. Instead of wrapping things up, the delegate contests in 24 states gave certainty a bad rap.

"As Tuesday night flowed into Wednesday morning, the Democratic race once again lacked a coherent story line. The surging Barack Obama movement, fueled all week by the Kennedy family endorsements, reached its temporary limits. Hillary Clinton -- who seemed just 48 hours ago to be on the wrong side of history -- managed to hold on to enough primary states (from Massachusetts to California) with her coalition of lower-income white women, white Catholics (particularly in the Northeast) and Latinos from coast to coast.

"On the Republican side, John McCain stumbled to the cusp of the nomination -- aided by a Mike Huckabee resurgence in the South at the expense of Mitt Romney . . . While McCain still arouses intense conservative opposition and has yet to prove that he can win in traditional GOP climes, he does seem poised to be bathed in the spotlight underneath the balloon drop at the Republican National Convention."

Andrew Sullivan: "The biggest news: I'd say it's Huckabee's astonishing resilience, with so few dollars and so little organization. The Bush-Rove party is a disproportionately religious organization and the pastor cannot be denied. The GOP's natural ticket is obviously McCain-Huckabee. It makes a lot of sense for the logic of today's religiously-based, war-motivated Republicanism. It's also a huge reminder that the so-called leaders of the conservative movement -- Limbaugh, Hewitt, Dobson, Levin, et al -- are very scantily clad emperors. Their bluff has been called. And it couldn't happen to a nicer crowd.

"On the Democratic side, the bottom line is that this is now a dead heat. Given Clinton's massive lead only a couple of weeks ago, that's a huge Obama gain."

Here's how it looked to me last night, in real time, as I channel-surfed away:

Clinton piled up victories early, getting little credit from the networks before Obama began catching up later in the evening. The results were more lopsided on the Republican side, with McCain winning a half-dozen states. But the anchors would not describe Super Tuesday as a big day for McCain. That, apparently, was not in the script.

There was a clear bias at the outset, in favor of Eastern time zones. The earliest results get the biggest play in prime time. That's how Huckabee became the early victor, by taking the West Virginia caucuses, which finished in mid-afternoon--enabling the former Baptist minister to assure Wolf Blitzer soon after 6 p.m. that he still believed in miracles. Who knew West Virginia was so important? But for several hours, it was all the networks had.

At 7 p.m., the cable nets wasted not a nanosecond, with CNN, Fox and MSNBC all calling Barack Obama the winner in Georgia. Obama had been expected to carry the state and its 16 delegates, so no one went overboard, but in football terms it put the Illinois senator on the board. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann raised a wire report that Obama had won Georgia on a "wave of black votes" -- the implication being that he would fare less well in states with smaller African American populations. CNN's Bill Schneider noted that Obama did, according to exit polls, take 39 percent of the white vote there.

At 7:31, A.B. Stoddard of the Hill became the first pundit to crawl out on a limb, telling Fox's Bill O'Reilly that Obama was looking strong. "I do think he's going to win the day . . . I think he actually might get California," she said. Stoddard was also bullish on McCain: "I would probably put my money on him wrapping it up tonight."