After each primary, the press and pundits go into a frenzy of over-analysis, pronouncing death for the candidate who lost the last primary. To be expected, I guess, in a 24/7 media system where writers have to generate new questions and columns every day. Now that Obama has been chewed over (following a primary in which his opponent netted only about a dozen delegates), it is time for the next round of tough questions -- which should go to Hillary Clinton's overtime campaign::

-- Senator Clinton, a new Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows that -- by a huge 70% to 30% margin -- young Democrats favor Senator Obama for the party's nomination. You consistently lose this group, which Obama has energized and drawn to the polls. Why should party leaders and superdelegates give up the party's future to throw the nomination to you?

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After Pennsylvania, what's next? The issue now is whether we Democrats can get our act together for the real election -- or, instead, continue to be picked apart by letting our internal struggle over marginally different candidates interact with -- and get magnified and used by -- the conservative attack machine and the media controversy machine. Even several more months of this toxic interaction may not keep us from winning the presidency, but it would reduce our margins for the next Congress, a very serious matter.

Looking back the morning after, this entire PA struggle over the past six weeks was a no-win situation. With all due respect to the idea that we are building networks to mobilize people in the falll, what all this did was merely get Clinton where she was almost bound to arrive in this one contest all along. Despite all the hysteria in the media and among analysts, this nomination contest is an intra-party exercise in marginal differentiation, and there is no surprise that many older voters and women voters chose Clinton -- or that Clinton obviously cannot "close the deal," in fact is doing worse and worse, among African Americans (who will ask her about that?) The sorting out of voters in a Democratic primary does not mean that most won't go with the party's Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees in November. Most older voters and women who support Clinton will go for Obama in the fall, and so will enough white working class men (a demographic that never goes entirely Demoocratic anyway), once the alternative is McCain and his temper and his pitiful pro-Bush and economics.

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