The primaries are still under way, and Sen. Hillary Clinton is still very much in the Democratic race. But Tuesday night in Madison, Wis., Sen. Barack Obama in effect launched his side of the general election campaign he fully expects to wage in November. Speaking in a key swing state, he declared the advent of "The New American Majority" he had first envisioned in a speech in New Hampshire, and launched into his most extensive, prime-time attack yet on the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain. (Obama had begun that pivot two days ago, when it became clear that he was going to win the Potomac Primary.) On Tuesday night, Hillary was all but forgotten in Obamaland.

Before a roaring crowd of 17,000, Obama slipped McCain into the slot that had been reserved for Clinton for months--the one about representing the past, not the future. The Illinois senator attacked McCain on the war in Iraq (the 100-year pledge) and his recent fealty to George Bush's tax cuts. "The Straight Talk Express lost its wheels!" Obama said.

The moment he finished, the cable networks switched to McCain's victory speech in Northern Virginia. Maybe the fall campaign won’t be framed in terms of "future and past," but at first glance, at least visually, it sure looked that way.
 
A new rule of politics should be: never speak after Obama, especially after Obama electrifies a rally. And yet McCain showed how feisty he is, and what a formidable foe he could be as he pledged a strong defense of the country's security. "We are the makers of history, not its victims," McCain declared.

Then McCain took on Obama directly, focusing on the Democrat’s signature obsession with the idea of hope. "Hope is a powerful thing," said McCain, but there is no hope in "rhetoric rather than sound ideas. That's not a not a promise of hope, it's a platitude." McCain seemed to dismiss Obama as a callow narcissist without mentioning his name. "I don't seek the presidency on the presumption that I am blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me.

"I am fired up and ready to go!" he concluded, stealing one of Obama's signature lines.

Game on.  

Looking closely at the NBC exit polls from Virginia, I see numbers that will make delightful reading for the Barack Obama campaign--and a cause for deep concern in John McCain's camp. Obama, the figures show, is expanding the demographic reach of his surging Democratic candidacy, while McCain is hemmed in by his increasingly glaring failure to win over conservatives and evangelical Christians.

With a large turnout among Democrats and independents (anyone can vote in any primary in Virginia), Obama scored smashing victories over Hillary Clinton among groups with whom he needed to show strength. Everybody knows he has the African-American vote locked up tight, as well as young people, single men and affluent, well-educated voters. But the other winning percentages in Virginia are the news Tuesday night, and they are pretty powerful. According to the NBC exit polls, Obama carried:

-- women: 58 percent
-- white men: 55 percent
-- latino: 55 percent
-- 60 years old and older: 52 percent
-- those with incomes under $30,000: 68 percent
-- independents: 67 percent
-- Roman Catholics: 52 percent

As the campaign moves foward, Obama has to be able to argue that he can reach the whole country, and the Virginia numbers are the best evidence yet that he can. His weakest catagory is among white self-described Democrats--the most regular of the party regulars. But he is closing in on them.

The McCain story in Virginia is the story of a campaign in danger of slowing down at a critical moment. In this late-sesason battle with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, McCain needed a respectable showing among evangelicals and conservatives. He didn’t get it. More than a third of voters in the GOP primary described themselves as "very conservative"--and they voted for Huckabee over McCain by a breathtaking 70-21 percent margin. Among born again Christians--who were 47 percent of all voters in the primary--Huckabee won by a 66-26 percent margin. And among the two thirds of GOP primary voters who said they wanted abortions to be illegal in all or most circumstances, Huckabee won by a 57-34-percent margin.

McCain ended up winning Virginia--narrowly--but the exit polls must give him pause. Does McCain need Huckabee at his side to win a race in the fall? Perhaps not, but McCain needs the Huckabee voters, now more than ever.

Here lieth the campaign of Mitt Romney, victim of the mistaken belief that the only way to succeed in national Republican politics was to turn yourself into something you are not. Or maybe the campaign revealed what his closest friends never imaged him to be. They thought he was a decent classy guy. But maybe he really is a soulless throat-cutter who would do and say anything to win.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was a good fellow who didn't know enough about national politics and listened to people who gave him bad, cynical advice.

Sen. John McCain was in a good position before; now it's hard to imagine that he won't wrap up the nomination in the next week or two. His lone remaining serious opponent, Mike Huckabee, has exceeded expectations, but expecting him to be able to unhorse McCain is perhaps expecting too much.

I have covered a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can't think of one that so lost its way-so expensively-as that of the former governor of Massachusetts. A board room and business favorite, a man with a Midas managerial touch, he was widely admired and even beloved. But he was a Republican of an old moderate school-that of his own father-and, like George W. Bush, Romney the Younger decided that he had to jettison all that he was to become something that he was not.

And so it was that this square peg spent perhaps $80 million-including at least $30 million of his own money-trying to pound himself into a round hole. It didn't work. The irony of his failed campaign: if he had just stuck to selling his managerial mettle, he might well have won the nomination, given the way the country's economic anxieties have become voters' number one concern.

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I'm watching Barack Obama speak in Chicago on election night of Super Tuesday. A year ago I was in Springfield, Illinois, watching him declare his candidacy for president on a frigid, windswept morning. The distance he has come is truly astonishing. "What began as a whisper in Springfield," he just said, "is now a chorus that cannot be deterred, for this campaign IS different."

When it comes down to it, the difference between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton is less about specifics-though they matter-than about emotion, language, tone and approach. His is a summoning to a higher cause in the name of history, using the cadence of poetry and the pulpit. Hillary, by contrast, is all about three-point plans and legislative language in the service of what they call "constituent service."

Obama calls his campaign a movement. He says we need to get over our fear. The subtext is: I am change, go for it. He talks about what people can do-do for themselves-rather than what government can do.

Both are valid arguments for Democrats. It is a close race, between poetry and prose. The conversation continues.

Is there still a lot in Camelot? As of 10 p.m. tonight I am not so sure. A week ago everyone, including this reporter, thought that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama was not only a moving, memorable moment, but a potential turning point in the campaign. This evening that is unclear. Indeed, if it was a turning point, it may have been in the wrong direction.

For one thing, Obama’s theme was change--and being embraced by Ted Kennedy may have conflicted with that essential message. Kennedy has been in the U.S. Senate since 1962! That is roughly as long as Obama has been alive.

When Teddy signed on, the Obama campaign asked him to see if he couldn’t reel in New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. He tried, making several calls to Richardson. It didn’t work. Richardson did not endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he did invite husband Bill to watch the Super Bowl with him.

The Obama campaign hoped that the endorsements of Sen. Kennedy and JFK’s daughter Caroline would help him cut into Hillary's lead among Hispanics. (Other members of the family went with Clinton, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Rep. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.) The Kennedy name helped, but, according to the exit polls, not enough. In California, for example, Hillary won 63 percent of the Latino vote, compared with 34 percent for Obama.

For Obama that was progress, but not the kind that Obama made tonight with other demographic groups.

Tonight, Hispanic voters are a huge story-not because they changed, but because they stayed the same. They began with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and largely stayed with her. As one of the top Latino strategists in the country explained to me a few minutes ago, Sen. Barack Obama is making inroads among younger, American-born Hispanics, but for the most part older and immigrant Latinos are staying with Clinton.

The Obama campaign had hoped that Sen. Ted Kennedy would be helpful with Latino voters, and he was-but only up to a point. He was unable to convince New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to endorse Obama. His best appeal among Latinos was on English-language TV. But most immigrant voters watch Spanish-language TV.

I am told by one of Richardson's closest friends that Richardson will not endorse any time soon. The next most prominent undecided Latino figure in the country is the actor Edward James Olmos. He is interested in issues-education particularly-and both campaigns have been trying to impress him.

No luck so far.

Sen. John McCain may do well tonight, but I am not convinced that he'll do what he needs to do: pacify conservatives who remain indispensable to his chances. We could end the night with a renewed three-way GOP race in which McCain gets only modest--and not nearly enough--conservative support.

The radio talk-show hosts I talked to in the last hour are convinced that the renewed strength of Mike Huckabee is all a plot by the McCain campaign to ruin Mitt Romney. But if there is any truth to that (and in West Virginia I think there was), the McCain campaign was being too cute by half. They may weaken Romney but give Huckabee a chance to position himself as the populist Son of the South.

And no Republican can win the presidency without a solid South. If Huckabee wins a clutch of Southern states, he will at least be in a strong bargaining position to affect the GOP platform and maybe the choice of the vice presidential nominee.

Which could be Huckabee.

In 1974, as Watergate was destroying the Republican presidency of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington to cheer up—and electrify—a rising generation of New Right activists. His patriotic speech ("We are … the last best hope of man on earth") was the first shot in what came to be known as the Reagan Revolution. The address was laced with praise for three recently released POWs he had brought with him. Proof that America was not a "sick society," he said, could be found in the "men who went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam." One of them was a Navy pilot who had become Reagan's (and his wife Nancy's) close friend. His name was Lt. John McCain.

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