Searching for Winners

What was striking about the comment was that Hillary was having a big night at that point, but no one was saying so. Maybe it was an inherent sense of caution. Maybe it was that some big states hadn't been called. And maybe there is just a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. Around 9:30, Obama got back in the W column with projected wins in Alabama and Kansas. Katie Couric attributed the latter victory to the backing of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, but Jeff Greenfield noted that Obama's mother grew up there.

The first recognition I saw of what was happening, around 9:45, came when Fox's Juan Williams offered this qualified appraisal: "The perception is that Hillary Clinton is the winner tonight."

But perhaps winning states isn't the name of the game, with the Dems' complicated proportional-representation rules. Tim Russert guessed on NBC that Obama and Clinton would finish "within 100 delegates of each other." And Diane Sawyer walked over to her political director to make sure her figures were right: Obama and Clinton each winning 3.2 million votes at that point. Of course, as Al Gore knows, what matters is where those votes are.

Around the same time, MSNBC was awarding New York to McCain. Here, too, no one was getting excited about the Arizonan picking off one state after another. Matthews called him "the Metroliner candidate," since he was winning in the Northeast corridor. "McCain is not closing the sale," Buchanan said. Joe Scarborough dismissed him as a "regional candidate."

What does that make Romney? At 10 p.m. he won heavily Mormon Utah, his other home state. Utah and Massachusetts. Not a great night so far.

And yet all night long, the talk has been about whether McCain could win over disgruntled conservatives. It was almost as if the pundits were following an old script, about talk radio's disaffection with McCain, while the numbers kept rolling in: wins in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois and, just after 10, Oklahoma.

Things began to pick up for Obama after 10, when the networks awarded him Connecticut and North Dakota, matching Hillary with six state wins. Couric pronounced Connecticut a "disappointing" loss for Clinton. And at almost 11, while Hillary was speaking, MSNBC put up a graphic awarding Minnesota to Obama.

Succumbing to the journalistic impulse to always look ahead, Couric asked whether Huckabee could be McCain's running mate. Schieffer said maybe but all but nominated Colin Powell. Greenfield said the pro-choice Powell wouldn't fly with the right.

Huckabee's star shined brighter when MSNBC called him the winner in Georgia. He was racking up wins in the South despite getting just a fraction of the coverage lavished on the McCain-Romney spitball fight in recent weeks.

"The Republican race is now a three-man race," Lou Dobbs announced on CNN, although few other analysts were touting Huckabee as a threat to win the nomination.

Romney managed to take Minnesota, according to a CNN projection at 11:10. But there was a growing feeling that Romney had been "really neutralized, really harmed," as Barnes put it on Fox. Meaning that McCain had done far better than the networks had been saying for hours.

Finally, at 12:15 a.m., MSNBC and Fox called California for Hillary, and MSNBC awarded it (and Missouri) to McCain. The tenor of the coverage began to change, but half the country was asleep.