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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