Primary Storm Took Wind Out of An Electric Event

A political earthquake struck on cue last night, as a previously obscure politician shoved aside Hillary Clinton and became the first African American to capture a major-party nomination for president.

But we've been tracking the tremors for so long that the ground felt like it already had shifted.

"The drama has drained out of it," says Walter Shapiro, Salon's Washington bureau chief. "I've been writing these pieces so long that I've started doing Nexis searches on my own sentences to make sure I'm not plagiarizing something on Hillary getting out of the race."

Barack Obama's victory may be historic, but even some black commentators have tired of the endless denouement. Callie Crossley, for example, is a Harvard media analyst, but "as a normal person, I think, 'Oh my God, I'm so sick of it I can hardly stand it.' And then I chastise myself." She says she clicks off any television story about delegate numbers.

"We're not even limping," Crossley says, "we're just dragging across the finish line, and everyone says, 'Oh, okay, whatever.' It feels redundant."

That's the thing about today's prediction-driven media culture: If a thousand pundits declare that Hillary is toast, then by the time she is charred around the edges it hardly seems like news. We've seen too many cable debates, newspaper analyses and blog postings about why Clinton won't drop out and whether she'll join the ticket to believe the outcome could be any different. After all, why would Time and Newsweek keep putting Obama on the cover if he weren't the unofficial nominee?

"The fact is," says CBS correspondent Jim Axelrod, "Obama has had this virtually insurmountable delegate lead for some time. That's what took the suspense away. When people get two or three days to let the whole thing sink in, they'll say, 'My God, this is huge.' "

Still, caution reigns in some quarters.

"I won't believe it till Denver," says Chuck Todd, NBC's political director, referring to the Democratic convention in August. Reached on a plane awaiting takeoff to New York for last night's show-closing Montana and South Dakota contests, he says: "The last three primary nights have been the definition of deja vu all over again. Pretty much since Texas, you kind of knew that this thing might be on its way to being over, but we kept reporting on it every week."

Trained in the art of wringing excitement from routine storms billed as "extreme weather," media outlets were pumping up the countdown: Would Obama sew up the required 2,118 delegates by last night's evening news? By the time the polls closed in Aberdeen and Butte? Or would he have to wait till this morning or even -- in a deflating development -- this afternoon ?

The thing briefly seemed over at 11:08 yesterday morning when the Associated Press, in an "urgent" report, cited two senior Clinton officials as saying that the New York senator "will concede" in her evening speech that Obama has the delegates for the nomination. "Clinton Acknowledges Reality," said a banner headline on Time.com's The Page.

But at 11:17, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe called CNN to declare the report "100 percent incorrect," insisting that "the race goes on." Harold Ickes phoned MSNBC with the same knockdown moments later.