The conventional wisdom held that the recent controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright would help drag one Democratic presidential hopeful down, at least a little while helping push the other up. As it turns out, according to the new poll from NBC News/Wall Street Journal, that’s exactly what happened — though the candidate that was supposed to go down went up.

Indeed, the poll results aren’t encouraging for the Clinton camp. While she had a four-point lead over Obama among Dems two weeks ago, she and Obama are now tied at 45%. In hypothetical general-election match-ups, Obama now leads McCain by two (44% to 42%), while McCain leads Clinton by two (46% to 44%). The Wright controversy was supposed to drive white Dems to Clinton in larger numbers, but her margin actually shrank in recent weeks, from 12 points to eight.

But it’s the personal impressions of Clinton that should be of the greatest concern. It appears, based on the data, that the tone of the nominating fight is taking its toll.

The silver lining in the whole Wright flap is that since right wing media has been pumping this story up to absurd levels, as shown in that Chris Wallace episode on FOX, it'll be hard for them to have spent 2 weeks talking about Obama's "racist Baptist Church" and then just simply go back to claiming Obama is a Muslim without lossing credibility among those that actually believe them.

But the Wright story was just too tempting and juicy that they must've thought they could do more damage airing and re-airing Wright footage than by simply continuing to insinuate That Obama was a Muslim. And highlighting Wright (and the fact that Obama is a Baptist) backfired since it only prompted Obama to step up and show true leadership, maturity and honesty about race and inspirational oratory. Instead of accentuating his supposed "radical" negatives, it served to highlight his positives when he gave that speech.