She's Not Dead Yet

The show goes on.

In retrospect, Hillary Clinton changed the tenor of this campaign in the last four days.

The pundits scoffed at her red-phone ad, but it shifted the focus to Barack Obama's commander-in-chief credentials.

She pounced on the NAFTA flap, which had Obama on the defensive because his campaign couldn't get its story straight.

She went on "Saturday Night Live" and the "Daily Show" (okay, I'm taking the kitchen-sink approach here).

And the news media, perhaps embarrassed by "SNL," turned a tad more critical of the phenomenon from Illinois.

So just as the media chatter about when oh when was she going to get out of the race was reaching a crescendo, she did what many journalists privately doubted she could do: Clinton won both Ohio and Texas.

Let's look at how the television coverage unfolded:

Obama, the Ben & Jerry-endorsed candidate, was projected to win Vermont at 7 p.m., but things slowed down after that.

Ohio may have been too close to call early on, but that didn't stop the MSNBC boys from slapping Hillary around. Chris Matthews asked whether Clinton is "on a route now to destroy the credibility of Barack Obama." Howard Fineman said that if Hillary continued in the race out of "stubbornness," she would be subjecting the party to "the death of a thousand cuts." Fineman described Hillary's answer on "60 Minutes" -- that Obama was not a Muslim as far as she knew -- as "brilliantly Machiavellian" and "positively Nixonian."

On Fox, meanwhile, there was talk about Rush Limbaugh urging Republicans to vote for Hillary, and she had been shortchanged by the media. "There's a backlash against the gentle press treatment of Barack Obama," Bill O'Reilly declared.

Even without winners, Tim Russert announced that the big states were so close that "there's no doubt about it -- this race is going to continue."