Will it still be "over" after West Virginia?

Hillary says she'll fight on, though the congealing consensus is that she's likely to behave like Mike Huckabee after Super Tuesday, running a purely positive campaign from here on out. (I'll believe that when I see it.)

In any event, the media CW that "it's over" remains firmly entrenched, as illustrated by the following clip from tonight's CBS Evening News, currently linked at the top of Drudge:

Here's how the New York Times put it: "Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton's continued viability as a presidential candidate."

But is the shift truly "irretrievable"? The big question in my mind is whether the "it's over" meme will survive Clinton's 30-point win (or more!) in West Virginia next Tuesday, followed by perhaps a 40-point win in Kentucky the following week.

Will the MSM have enough discipline to recognize that, in this primary season where demography is destiny, these inevitable Clinton landslides will tell us nothing new about either candidate, and will not demonstrate that Obama "can't close the deal" or that Hillary is "fighting back"? (In truth, the results will demonstrate only that two of the three most naturally Hillary-friendly states in the nation -- the other being Arkansas -- coincidentally happen to hold their primaries right near the end of the process.)

Or will the MSM once again fall prey to the allure of shiny moving objects, allowing Hillary to successfully use this coincidence of the calendar to generate fake "momentum" down the stretch? Will her utterly predictable blowout wins turn the media storyline back in her favor, freezing the superdelegates and focusing everyone's attention on May 31 and June 1 (i.e., Michigan, Florida and Puerto Rico)?

I honestly don't know the answer to that question, but it will determine whether anyone takes Hillary Clinton seriously during the final month of this long campaign.

Comments

[JD]

My guess would be that Hillary wants the votes in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico so that, when combined with Michigan and Florida, she would have the "lead" in the popular vote. Numbers from RealClearPolitics:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html

But for that to work, she'd likely have to discard Iowa, Washington state, Nevada, and Maine completely (since they didn't give actual numbers).

[JD]

Never mind. Brendan already covered all of that.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!?!

[Joe Mama]

Heh:

After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's ZIP code.

[Angrier and Angrier]

Has anyone else been on one of those first dates with a self-loathing gal who, during the course of the evening, gets liquored up and starts talking about God and marriage and ex-boyfriends and won't fucking leave?

That is Hillary Clinton.