Time on Obama's side as his momentum grows
  • Coast to coast, everywhere you looked, the Democratic presidential candidates - and more importantly, the voters - shattered stereotypes and defied conventional wisdom.

    Barack Obama, who was criticized by Hillary Clinton's supporters as the "black" candidate with little cross-racial appeal, won caucuses in some of the whitest states imaginable - Utah, Minnesota, Idaho, North Dakota and Kansas - along with largely black Georgia and Alabama.

    Clinton had a trick up her sleeve as well, delivering a delicious snub to the Kennedy clan - and throwing shade on Obama's second-coming-of-JFK pose - by winning Massachusetts.

    Assuming the candidates more or less split the main prize of California, the Democratic race today will be deadlocked. And that is bad news for Clinton.

    In one remarkable month, Obama erased Clinton's double-digit lead in national polls, raised more than twice as much money - $32 million to $13.5 million - and destroyed any notion that the Democratic presidential nomination is Clinton's to lose.

    Top members of Clinton's team have publicly acknowledged what Tuesday's results made clear: They cannot check Obama's momentum.

    A top Clinton spokesman told The Wall Street Journal the campaign is likely to remain unresolved all the way up to the August convention in Denver.

    That's not just an admission that Clinton's inevitability strategy has failed: It also means Obama will have the time and money to march his formidable field organization - and advertising team - into the next battlegrounds, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State.

    Most of all, the next week will bring more of the phenomenon that most bedevils Team Clinton: Obama's fast-growing, improbable status as a cool, iconic figure among students and artists.