Hillary picks up some momentum, but they both need to clean up their acts
SAN ANTONIO -- Tuesday night was a pretty good one for Hillary Clinton.
Victories in both Texas and Ohio -- and Rhode Island, too.
Whether it will be enough to reverse the flow of this race, it is -- for the moment -- enough to put some gas in her tank on what remains a rocky and uncertain road to the White House.
But no matter what the final popular vote totals turn out to be, to paraphrase Ragin' Cajun strategist James Carville, it's about the delegates, stupid. And Barack Obama has more of the pledged variety and has been steadily peeling off Clinton superdelegates, too.
Neither one has yet to reach the magic number. And that's why this race has more laps to run.
What accounts for Clinton's successes last night?
Maybe the "Saturday Night Live" Factor.
Tina Fey, in a recent SNL skit, declared approvingly of the New York senator, "She's a bitch," adding with great comic authority, "Bitch is the new black."
The skit got a lot of laughs -- even from Sen. Clinton's best girlfriends. "I thought it was great," Betsy Ebeling said Tuesday in Houston.
That's because Fey seized a standard slam and turned it on its head, taking on Clinton critics in the process by recasting the tag to mean a woman who is tough, strong, and fearless.
It was no picnic in Texas and Ohio this past week for Obama. There was his campaign's screamingly non-transparent NAFTA-gate dance with the Canadians. There was the just-beginning corruption trial of Obama's friend and former fund-raiser Tony Rezko. And there was Clinton's scare-you-to-death red phone attack ad.
Clinton used it all to drum up desperately needed momentum to try to rework the delegate math. Stopping perhaps any more superdelegates from slipping away to the other side.
The Alamo state did not turn out to be Hillary Clinton's last stand. It marked instead a new, if shaky, beginning.
In this economically wounded, war-weary country, there is an ache for Obama's kind of inspiration. And a yearning for Clinton's kind of competence.
But voters and media need to demand even more as this election marches on.
Clinton needs to never again reprise her insincere ''60 Minutes'' answer that Obama is not a Muslim "as far as I know." It's foul play.
And Obama needs to stop tap-dancing around his failure to fully answer a host of Rezko questions and finally provide the many details we lack about Rezko's fund-raising and real estate assistance.
"Saturday Night Live" has parodied us in the press as fawning groupies for Obama, something the candidate disputes but nonetheless has a certain resonance.
"Clearly Tina Fey and I are going to have a conversation," said Obama Tuesday. "You know, I think she hasn't met me."
Given Clinton's victories last night, there's time.
