“Today, what North Carolina decided is that the only game that needs changing is the one in Washington, D.C.,” Obama told a large crowd at NCSU’s Reynolds Coliseum.

The audience, like the candidate, seemed to be savoring a sense of exhilaration and relief. The most turbulent weeks of his campaign had concluded with results that forcefully rebutted doubts the Clinton campaign had sought to plant about his electability and tenacity.

His speech seemed to go some way to solving other, more nebulous, problems too.

In recent weeks, Obama has been assailed from some quarters for having allowed his candidacy to slip off the high road by getting into tit-for-tat scraps with his opponent. Yet he has also been accused by others --notably Clinton stalwart James Carville, who called his manliness into question -- of having shown insufficient fight.

The key passage from last night’s address was an attempt to untangle that dilemma. Obama stated that smear campaigns and personal attacks would be run against any Democratic candidate, “whether it is myself or Senator Clinton.”

“The question then is not what kind of campaign they will run; it’s what kind of campaign we will run,” he said, to loud applause. “It’s what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn’t get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics. But I am running for president because this is the time to end it.”

He presented it, not for the first time, as a decision America would have to make about its politics.

“Don’t ever forget that we have a choice in this country,” Obama urged the crowd at the climax of his speech. “We can choose not to be divided…we can choose not to be afraid…we can still choose this moment to finally come together and solve the problems we’ve talked about all those other years and all those other elections. This time can be different than all the rest.”

The speech had at least two other notable aspects. It contained several overt professions of patriotism, and it included a clear message that it was time for Democrats to coalesce.

The Illinois senator twice referred to his “love” of his country and he concluded his speech with the phrase “May God bless you and the United States of America.” Neither formulation was regularly heard in speeches in the early days of his candidacy.

Obama asserted that one crucial factor should bind Democrats well before November’s presidential election: “We can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term.”

Democratic unity is, as things currently stand, not a given. When Obama congratulated Clinton on appearing to win Indiana – a concession that would for a while seem premature, since the result remained in doubt for around four hours after he left the stage -- a smattering of boos could be heard in the arena.

But Obama did not miss the opportunity to remind superdelegates of how close he is to victory. He emphasized that he was now “less than 200 delegates away from securing the Democratic nomination.” (That calculation doesn’t include delegates from the non-sanctioned primaries in Florida and Michigan.)

The air of renewed confidence enveloped Obama aides as well as the senator himself. Chief strategist David Axelrod made his way through the crowd, slapping the backs and pumping the hands of campaign volunteers.

“We feel really great about the position we’re in, despite the tortured constructions we’re getting from the Clinton side,” he told reporters. “We believe the momentum and the superdelegates will continue to go our way and we will be where we need to be before the convention.”

Obama supporters were jubilant. Declaring herself “even more inspired” by having seen the candidate in person for the first time, 33-year-old Renee Edwards praised the senator’s “vision for the nation” and said that “he just makes you trust him.”

Edwards, a consultant in Raleigh who is African-American, also dismissed talk of racial divisiveness in the nominating contest.

“I think Barack is bridging that gap. Look at what he has done tonight,” she said. “And this is in a southern state.”

The epic nomination battle of 2008 felt to everyone in the room like it was, at last, reaching a conclusion.

Hillary Clinton won Indiana, barely, giving her as many states on the day as Obama got.

But the result made clear one thing: It doesn't matter anymore.

Ever since she fell hopelessly behind Obama in the pledged-delegate and popular-vote counts during a string of February defeats, Clinton has clung to a long-shot nomination strategy. She would not be able to overtake him in delegates or popular votes in the late primaries, but she could use them to shake Democrats’ confidence in Obama as a general-election candidate.

This would mean winning overwhelmingly in the late states where she was favored and picking off some or all of those that he had been expected to win. Only then, with Clinton making a compelling case that Obama’s supporters were abandoning him in droves, would superdelegates—loath to overturn “the will of the people” and to risk the devastating intraparty warfare that would come from thwarting an African-American who won a pledged-delegate majority in the primaries—be receptive to lining up with her en masse.

To Clinton’s credit, she strung this all out longer than many thought she could. She won in Ohio and Texas on March 4, when defeat would have meant the end for her. Then she pulled out Pennsylvania on April 22, and suddenly the wind seemed to be at her back. She began receiving a hearing from some opinion-makers on her specious “big state” argument and her questions about Obama’s seeming inability to connect with white working-class voters (something that made the coverage of Jeremiah Wright’s untimely reemergence all the more devastating for him). For the first time since January, Clinton picked up a new batch of superdelegate endorsements and when she latched onto a gas-tax-holiday plan and began bashing “elitists,” game-changing wins in Indiana and North Carolina suddenly became plausible.

So much for that.

Obama has absolutely clobbered her in North Carolina. As of this writing, the final numbers aren’t known, but it’s clear that his margin will be well into double digits. The Clintons can claim that this is an improvement from polls conducted months ago—their surrogates seem to be engaged in an informal competition to one-up each other in stating the initial size of her deficit; Terry McAuliffe said 25 points, while Governor Mike Easley went with 34—but political observers, and superdelegates in particular, know better. The North Carolina results do not suggest any significant erosion in Obama’s standing in the state during what has been a very rough few weeks for him.

This alone is enough to derail the Clinton strategy. A win in North Carolina would have been powerful evidence that Democrats are turning on Obama and that the character attacks had rendered him unelectable. A very narrow loss might have helped the Clintons make this case as well. But a landslide defeat?

The implications of the Carolina result are many. First, it reaffirms—yet again—the lack of momentum in this race. The outcome of just about every state has been predictable well in advance. This was true in the Clinton states of New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania (among others) and it proved true in North Carolina on Tuesday. For all of the poll fluctuations before all of these contests, primary day has inevitably resulted in states reverting to form. That there was no measurable momentum in North Carolina is even more significant, because Obama couldn’t have possibly endured a worse two weeks than these past two.

This means that the remaining few contests are basically foregone conclusions. Clinton will win West Virginia next week, Kentucky on the 20th and Puerto Rico on May 1. Obama will win Oregon in two weeks and South Dakota and Montana on June 3. A split, in other words—not the decisive and jaw-dropping series of late wins that Clinton absolutely had to have.

North Carolina also essentially locks in Obama’s edge in the popular vote. His margin should undo whatever benefit Clinton reaped from her win in Pennsylvania. No fair and reasonable calculation of the cumulative popular vote at the end of this process will show Clinton ahead. It is now mathematically inconceivable.

Against these realities, the Indiana results almost don’t matter. Obviously, if Obama ends up ahead when all the votes are tallied, the race will end on the spot, and Clinton won’t even have license to pursue meaningless wins in West Virginia and Kentucky. But even if Clinton hangs on, it will be for show.

Clinton’s strategy since Feb. 5 never stood much chance of working and allowed room for absolutely no slip-ups. Now it’s over.

He called Hillary Clinton a "formidable opponent," and congratulated her for her victory in Indiana, and expressed confidence that the party would be united come November.

The full speech follows:

UPDATE: In the delivered speech, Obama congratulated Clinton on "what appears to be her victory" in Indiana.

So why has his campaign felt like a long march over broken glass?

“It is painful to watch,” said an influential Obama supporter and delegate in an interview the day before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. “It’s exhausting for everyone involved. It’s exhausting for Barack and Michelle. It’s exhausting for all the campaign staff, and I know it’s exhausting for the supporters.”

The May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana provided the campaign and its backers some long-awaited relief. Nominally, it was a split-decision—Hillary Clinton won, as expected, in Indiana—. But Mr. Obama's thumping win on the friendly turf of delegate-rich North Carolina destroyed the Clinton campaign's last hope for a narrative-shifting upset and may well have killed off the contest in the eyes of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates.

It's the first good news the Obama campaign has had in what seems like an eternity.

In the past month, as Mr. Obama was thrashed in the press over the comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and suffered a concurrent dip in his poll numbers, he and his campaign took on a halting, almost mournful air. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, settling comfortably and unapologetically into attack mode, looked downright giddy.

Even the Obama campaign’s process-based spin—that he had an unassailable lead—went from devastating gloat to sad-sack defense. Two months ago, in the context of Obama’s string of post-Super Tuesday victories, campaign manager David Plouffe’s stark warning to the Clinton campaign that “they are going to fail and fail miserably” in overcoming the 160-odd pledged-delegate deficit was a dagger intended to convince the still-skeptical press to stop treating Hillary Clinton like a winner and to show superdelegates that they’d do well to get on board quickly. More recently, when the campaign repeated the same statistical argument, it was to convince those same superdelegates (and journalists, maybe) to ignore what was plain for them to see: that Mrs. Clinton had been getting the better of things again and again and again.

On Monday night, as Mrs. Clinton completed her morph into a Wall Street-bashing, China-baiting, whiskey-shooting populist, Mr. Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, sent out a statement noting that with the three superdelegates endorsing Mr. Obama earlier that day, Obama was “only 273 delegates away from securing the Democratic nomination.” That was followed by a list of “The Math” and a link to maps and timelines on a “Results Center” page on the campaign Web site. Comforting stuff for Obama supporters, if not exactly inspiring.

“She is certainly working harder in North Carolina—she and President Clinton and Chelsea have been to more than 40 communities in North Carolina,” said Representative G. K. Butterfield, an Obama supporter whose district is in the northeastern part of the state. Mr. Butterfield intended this as an explanation, if not a defense, of Mr. Obama’s shrunken lead in the statewide polls in the days leading up to the election.

“So she is certainly working harder,” he continued. “The nomination doesn’t necessarily go to the one who works the hardest but the one who gets the number of delegates. And right now, mathematically, Senator Obama is going to get the required number of delegates, and I cannot imagine that the superdelegates who are uncommitted will support someone who did not succeed with the voters.”

Ed Turlington, a former adviser to John Edwards who endorsed Obama last month, said, “The math is resounding in its own way.”

It was not resounding enough, apparently, for the media, for whom Mr. Obama became the laughably plodding front-runner that Mrs. Clinton once was.

In The New York Times on May 4, Allan Gurganus—who is clearly sympathetic to the Obama cause—panned Mr. Obama’s campaign performance in North Carolina in a guest Op-Ed: “Is he fatigued? And we aren’t? He puts in his full 40 minutes. He punches a clock. That clock is 20,000 souls he knew he had already.”

By contrast, the media made much of Mrs. Clinton’s scrappy new persona. The front page of Monday’s Times featured a story about Mrs. Clintons’ “Love of the Fight” next to one with the more tepid headline “Obama Survives Furor.” Inside, a critique of their respective Sunday morning talk show appearances—Mr. Obama was grilled by Tim Russert in a one-on-one interrogation; Mrs. Clinton toyed with George Stephanopoulos in front of a sympathetic live audience—spoke of “an arresting tableau of the reversal of fortunes in the Democratic race.”

This constant drumbeat, too, had been depressing for Mr. Obama’s supporters. “There aren’t many newspapers that sell stories of ‘Obama still ahead and still likely to win,’” said one major donor to Mr. Obama with experience with past presidential campaigns. “I can’t think of a candidate who went on a consistent upward glide path to the nomination or to the presidency. It doesn’t mean it’s fun. In fact, to the contrary, it is not fun. But anything other than that would probably be counterproductive in the long run.”

Maybe. Or maybe, more precisely, the conclusion to draw from the weeks leading up to North Carolina and Indiana is that “feelings” about the election are irrelevant.

Which is the good news for Mr. Obama’s meandering campaign: The math argument, while uninspiring and joyless, is proving absolutely correct. All indications are that the candidates will continue to share the delegate spoils in the remaining contests—good for Mr. Obama, deadly for Mrs. Clinton—and the superdelegates have shown no sign whatsoever of making a collective break into the Clinton column.

Mr. Obama did seem to be rebounding somewhat, or at least refocusing, in the final days before Tuesday’s primaries. Seizing on a proposed gas-tax holiday, he reframed Mrs. Clinton as a disingenuous Washington hack and himself as the bearer of much-needed change and truth in government. His young daughters and wife made campaign appearances with him to illustrate, physically, what a normal American family guy he is. (“He’s got some Midwestern roots, and most people have families, so we relate to seeing his,” said Greg Apple, a 53-year-old construction worker and supporter who went to see him at a “family day” picnic in Noblesville, Ind.) He shot baskets and talked kitchen table issues, drank beer and asked for extra gravy with his biscuits.

And when asked, he insisted, however cautiously, that he will be the nominee.

“Senator Clinton will have to make her own decisions if she is behind in the delegate count,” said Mr. Obama at an Indianapolis press conference on the Friday before the election.

He asserted that over the final stretch of the race he intended to run a positive campaign about the strength of the American dream. “If we do that over the next month, regardless of where the polls go, regardless of the outcomes of any particular contest, then I think I’ll end up being the nominee,” he said.

And as primary day finally arrived for the voters of North Carolina and Indiana—these contests were widely touted by analysts as the last of many last chances for Mrs. Clinton to alter the seemingly inexorable Obama-ward direction of the campaign—Mr. Obama’s supporters finally sounded as if they were actually preparing to feel like front-runners again.

“Once you get past tomorrow,” said James Rubin, a New York investor and a major Obama donor, “even if it’s a split, you get back to the fact that he is an extraordinary candidate and he is winning.”

“It’s not uncommon for a nominee to lose states down the stretch,” said Representative Artur Davis of Alabama. “It’s not uncommon for there to be some last-minute buyer’s remorse that kicks in.”

Mr. Davis acknowledged that Mr. Obama had endured a very rough couple of weeks. But, he said: “The psychology of the race may change from week to week, but as a practical matter, Senator Obama continues to add to his delegate count,” while the Clinton campaign “is running out of innings.”

The math, he said, no longer left any room for doubt.

jhorowitz@observer.com

Conversely, a pair of outright Obama wins would almost instantly end the Democratic fight, with previously uncommitted superdelegates interpreting an Obama victory on Clinton turf as cause to step in and finish Clinton off on behalf of the party’s rank-and-file.

Both of these outcomes, it should be said, are far-fetched. Clinton will almost certainly prevail in Indiana, where her lead has spiked in recent polls into the high single digits and even into double digits in some polls. And it would take an epic upset for Clinton to dislodge Obama in North Carolina, where his lead – once nearly 20 points, just as hers once was in Pennsylvania and Ohio – has been significantly eroded, but where he remains the prohibitive favorite.

That means that victory on Tuesday night will be determined in large part by the inexact and somewhat arbitrary collective sentiments of the political news media, which will deem one candidate’s margin of victory or defeat more impressive and meaningful than the other.

Should Clinton keep North Carolina within, say, six points, the press figures to award a moral victory for cutting deeply into Obama’s early lead in the state (probably courtesy of those crucial white working-class voters we’ve heard so much about), while a double-digit win for Obama – a result that most everyone expected until about a week ago – might be taken as a sign that he has regained some of his footing after a very rough few weeks.

In Indiana, a close race (within, say, five points) will probably count as a moral victory for Obama, particularly if it’s accompanied by a lopsided North Carolina win. If Obama makes it a game in Indiana, where only 9 percent of the electorate is black, it would suggest that the Clintons’ best efforts to drive an even bigger wedge between Obama and working-class white voters have failed. But a convincing, double-digit Clinton win, especially coupled with a close call in Carolina, would indicate that their tactics are working better now than before.

This will all make for plenty of interesting primary night chit-chat, but if the debate on Tuesday night is about whose one-state victory is more impressive, the winner – in the big picture – will be Obama, because unlike Clinton, he will win the nomination if the two candidates essentially trade wins for the rest of the primary season.

If North Carolina and Indiana break as expected, it will simply reaffirm the pattern that has prevailed in state after state this primary season, with the outcome of most primaries and caucuses predicted weeks or months in advance. Clinton was supposed to win Indiana, if narrowly. Obama was supposed to win North Carolina. If that’s how it ends up, the biggest loser on the night will be – once again – momentum. And it will mean, most probably, that Obama will win primaries in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana in May and June, and that Clinton will prevail in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. That is how all of those states (plus the commonwealth) are “supposed” to vote.

And if that’s how the rest of the primaries play out, it will not be nearly enough for Clinton to catch Obama in pledged delegates (a metric that even Clinton loyalists now concede they won’t be able to win) or in any reasonable and widely-accepted attempt to calculate the popular vote. This will doom her slim chances of winning over the vast majority of unpledged superdelegates. She’ll probably need to nab 70 percent (or more) of them when this process ends, and to move superdelegates in those numbers, her case would need to be overpowering. Simply winning some big states in the late months of the campaign won’t be enough to convince this group to void the “will of the people.”

So if Obama sweeps Tuesday’s primaries, he will essentially win the nomination on the spot. If he notches a split with Clinton, even in a manner deemed unimpressive by the media, his coronation will be put on hold until early June.

That leaves only one scenario in which Clinton’s nomination prospects are truly reinvigorated on Tuesday night, and it’s the longest shot on the board: a two-state Clinton sweep. Were she to pull this off, some of the fundamental assumptions that have defined the Democratic race would be reconsidered, by both the media and party leaders.

For one, a Clinton sweep would mark the undeniable change in the basic dynamic of the race for the first time since the New Hampshire, with her success in Pennsylvania and her good press of the past two weeks actually translating into a meaningful boost at the polls. This would raise the possibility that Democrats are actually deserting Obama in large numbers and would potentially set the stage for Clinton to steal some or all of the three remaining “Obama states” on the primary calendar. And if she did that, she’d probably catch him in a fair calculation of the popular vote. Winning that metric, combined with widespread panic by Democrats that Obama’s support is evaporating, might be enough to produce the superdelegate tsunami that Clinton is counting on.

Under this scenario, it’s still theoretically possible to envision her winning the nomination even while losing the pledged-delegate race. Anything short of this just won’t be enough.

The personal slights aimed at her family seemed to irk Ms. Obama most of all.

“See, there’s a whole lot of talk in this race about elitism and people being out of touch,” she told a crowd of approximately 1,500 in the Ovens auditorium.

“Let me tell you something: the last thing I thought [was] that of the candidates running in this race, that Barack and I would be pegged as the elitists.

“I tell you, that came as a shock to my system,” she added, as members of the audience laughed and cheered. “I’m like, ‘Man, isn’t politics great?’”

Ms. Obama underlined her working-class upbringing on the south side of Chicago. She also sought to emphasize the modest nature of her and her husband’s lives, recalling that they only fully paid off their student debts a few years ago.

“You imagine: when was the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States just a few years outside of paying down their loan debt? The only reason we’re not in debt today, to this very day, is because Barack wrote two best-selling books. It was like hitting the lotto.”

Turning her attention to policy matters, Ms. Obama ridiculed “this gas holiday everybody’s talking about.” She joked that “the theory is that if they call it a holiday it’ll feel like a gift.”

She described the proposal as the “kind of political gimmick that has been the hallmark of Washington.”

Ms. Obama sought to tie that debate to the much larger issue of how – in her eyes, at least – her husband has an aversion to acting out of political expediency. Segueing from the gas-tax proposal to a discussion of the war in Iraq, she argued that her husband’s opposition to that war was “Exhibit A” when it came to proving his integrity.

“If you want to know who these candidates are and what they do in times of crisis, we have evidence,” she said.

She added that “none of the other candidates found the courage” to oppose the war, instead declaring their support using “their insider Washington lingo.”

The duration of Ms. Obama’s speech – 67 minutes – was considerably longer than the addresses the candidates themselves usually give. But the crowd’s attention never seemed to wander; in fact, the speech was often interrupted by applause and shouts of approval.

Ms. Obama insisted that with every success the Illinois senator’s campaign enjoyed – early fund-raising strength, powerful on-the-ground organizing, victory in the Iowa caucuses – the pundit classes found a new, unfulfilled metric by which they said he should be judged.

After Iowa, she said, “all of a sudden Iowa was no longer important. … I’m scratching my head, 'cause I’m trying to keep up.”

But she sought to connect the campaign’s frustrations with those of the American people. Referring again to the notion that the bar keeps getting moved “just out of reach” of the Obama campaign, she added, “The irony is that’s exactly what’s been happening to the American people. The bar has been moving and shifting on the vast majority of Americans.”

The notion of the moving bar remained a running theme of the speech, and it seemed to resonate especially strongly among an audience that was largely African-American.

Ms. Obama’s closing words struck the kind of tone that her critics deride as hubristic but supporters deem inspirational.

She instructed the crowd to “close your eyes and do some dreaming. … I want you to dream of the day that a man like Barack Obama is standing in front of the Capitol with a hand on the Bible to take the oath of office to become the next president of the United States.”

The rest of her words were drowned out by a thunderous standing ovation.

“The question I have for you, Charlotte, is can we do this?” she finally asked. As shouts of “yes we can” rang back, Ms. Obama said simply, “I need you tomorrow.”

I traveled back and forth from Charlotte, the largest city in North Carolina, this past weekend. I grew up there.

All the anecdotal evidence suggested that it's Obama country.

One voter told me on Friday that she had had to wait an inordinately long time to cast an early ballot at a downtown precinct (she was voting for Clinton, but no matter). Most of those in line were African-American, and many of them were registering to vote; the deadline to register for this election was Friday. Another voter told me a similar tale of a long wait for early voting.

Sunday’s Charlotte Observer reported that early voter turnout in Mecklenburg County—home of Charlotte—had increased 914 percent over 2004. In neighboring Union County, increasingly a bedroom community for Charlotte, early voter turnout was up 515 percent; in neighboring Iredell County, 1,016 percent. And many were African-American in a state that’s roughly 21 percent so, according to the Census.

“I’d tell Clinton and Obama to hold on tight,” Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program for Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill, told The News & Observer of Raleigh. “They’re going to have the biggest turnout ever in the state.”

That turnout, according to The News & Observer, could break the 1984 Democratic primary record of 961,000 voters. Add Republican voters in, and roughly 2 million North Carolinians—about 1 in 4 residents—will have cast ballots by the end of today.

Many will undoubtedly be cast in Charlotte and in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, the two most populous areas of the state; and, it should be said in this instance, the two most well-educated and most unlike the rest of North Carolina and the South at large.

And the two areas where Obama has drawn his largest crowds during the primary campaign.

Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, often called the Triangle because of Research Triangle Park, which falls within the area, boasts one of the nation’s highest concentrations of college graduates and PhDs. This is due mostly to the park but also to the major universities in the area, including Duke, N.C. State and UNC.

Charlotte, one of the 20 biggest cities in the U.S. now, is the nation’s second-largest financial hub, behind Manhattan, with the headquarters of both Wachovia and Bank of America. The city and its suburbs also teem with Northern transplants (including 25 from my immediate family, most them there via upstate New York). Plus, like the Triangle, Charlotte is more educated—and more affluent—than the rest of North Carolina.

My guess is this: that the Obama victory map Tuesday evening will mirror Clinton’s victory map in Pennsylvania: she won just about every area except Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; in North Carolina, Obama will win Charlotte and the Triangle (and a few other areas perhaps, like Wilmington).

Clinton will win just about everywhere in between. But it won’t be enough.

In the process, she sought once again to portray Barack Obama as less knowledgeable about the problems of the less fortunate.

Clinton's criticisms of China were especially full-throated. She described a country "that manipulates its currency to their advantage, that subsidizes all kinds of costs for their businesses and workers, that engages [in] and permits wholesale counterfeiting, theft of intellectual property and industrial espionage, and sends us back lead-based toys, contaminated pet food and polluted pharmaceuticals.

"This is going to end when I am president of the United States," she added, to cheers.

Clinton also said that she had received an email in the car on the way to the event that said the price of oil had topped $120 per barrel for the first time.

"We are over the barrel of the oil-producing countries and companies because we refuse to say we're not going to put up with it," she said.

She promised that, if elected, she would "go after" OPEC.

Referring to the group as a "monopoly cartel" that sits "in some conference room a couple of times a year" deciding the price of oil, she called for a change in the law that would enable the U.S. to "sue them on anti-trust reasons and go to the World Trade Organization with them."

Clinton used the subject of oil prices as a pivot from which to repeat her call for a summer holiday from gas tax.

"Senator Obama wants you to pay the gas tax this summer instead of trying to get the oil companies to pay it out of their record profits," she said.

And she added that another part of the "larger difference" between her and Obama was that she had been "saying for over a year, we [should] take on the Wall Street bankers and mortgage companies that misled so many people into these sub-prime mortgages.'"

Citing Obama's lack of support for an enforced freeze on home foreclosures, Clinton went on yet again to assert her empathy for working people and, by implication, call Obama's into question.

"Part of the job of a president," she stated, "is living in the here and now, to try to make it clear to American families, middle class people, hard-working folk, that somebody hears you and somebody sees you and somebody knows what's going on right here in High Point, North Carolina."

Clinton left no stone unturned in her bid to connect with her audience, once again exhibiting the tendency to slip into a Southern-tinged accent when speaking anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

"It's time to quit wringin' our hands and start rollin' up our sleeves," she said at one point. A short time later, she pronounced the town's name as "Hah Point."

She also more playfully admitted there was one question she would not answer on the campaign trail: where the best barbecue food can be found.

"I've made plenty of mistakes in my life but I'm not walking into that one," she joked.

The setting of the speech--Clinton spoke on near a station entrance, while the media crowded onto a bridge over the tracks--left the former first lady dependent upon a lack of train traffic in order to be heard.

North Carolina governor Mike Easley, introducing the candidate, said that at a similar event elsewhere in the state, a passing train "ran out of steam before she did."

Clinton escaped serious interruption until the climax of her speech, when a train came into view.

Rather than do battle with the noise of the engines, Clinton smilingly informed her audience to imagine the train was "taking us into the future" and wrapped up.

Though it was not clear exactly what studies he was referring to, Clinton appeared especially irked by criticism of the senator's proposal to offer consumers a summer 'holiday' from gasoline taxes. Hillary Clinton had earlier defended the plan earlier in the day during an appearance on ABC's 'This Week' with George Stephanopoulos.

Referring to high gas prices as "an emergency for millions of American families", the former president protested during a stop in Newton that his wife's idea had "been roundly criticized by her opponent and all the elite media who say, 'Oh, this is just pandering to the poor working people at election time.'

"Let me tell you something," he continued. "I haven't read a single article accusing her of pandering by somebody who's having trouble filling up their gas tank. This is a classic illustration of one of Clinton's laws of politics: whenever you hear someone snootily saying, 'This is not a money problem', they are not talking about their own problem."

The implication – that not just Clinton's media critics but Obama himself is a snobbish or "snooty" elitist – was hardly accidental.

Clinton's ardor for the campaign trail is much in evidence at the moment. His Sunday schedule took in six rallies across the Tar Heel State, which, along with Indiana, holds its Democratic primary tomorrow. Today, the former president is expected to address nine such gatherings.

In his appearance on the porch of a private home in Newton and later, speaking in a school gymnasium in Kernersville on the outskirts of Greensboro, Clinton emphasized his own humble beginnings again and again.

"Hillary and I were broke in law school," he recalled in Newton. "I had six jobs in law school; never more than three at once. I was young and, shoot, I was so dumb, I didn't think I was poor. I thought I was rich. I could put gas in the car."

To the sweltering crowd in Kernersville, the former president recalled, down to the cent, what his monthly mortgage payments were on his first house ($174.50), as well as what his salary was at the time ($16,000), and how small the house was (1100 square feet).

And, somewhat oddly, he told both crowds a story that, in emphasizing the importance of higher fuel efficiency standards, also highlighted his purported mechanical expertise.

By way of explaining why his wife had asked him to verify a story she had been told about a car that was capable of getting 100 miles per gallon, Clinton said, "I grew up in the car business. I was under a car when I was five or six years old. That's back when a real person could still repair his own car. Not like today."

Sometimes, as when talking about his first house, Clinton struck a gently nostalgic tone. And, in Newton, his irritation at the alleged unfairness of the media was at least leavened by an evident pride in his wife's tenacity. Protesting about the amount of "ridicule" to which he said she been exposed, Clinton added, "The girl just kept churning on, 'cos she is in it for the right reasons."

But at the climax of his appearance in Kernersville, his next stop, he conveyed a more bitter tone. The former president, voice rising, jabbed at those whom he appeared to feel had betrayed Hillary:

"She's been counted out more times than a cat's got lives. And people in places like this kept bringing her back. [The pundits] said, 'Oh, she's going down in California, all the famous people are against her'. Well, they were and she won by ten points, ‘cause the people who needed a president were for her."

The same predictions of doom, he added, were made, "in Massachusetts, where both the senators and the governor are against her. They were. But all the people in Massachusetts who needed a president were for her. She won by 15 points."

In a sharp dig at Obama, albeit one which he has made before, Clinton told the predominantly middle-aged and overwhelmingly white audience, "You just have to decide whether you need a president or a feeling."

The extent to which Clinton seems to view the current campaign as a referendum on his legacy has been much noted in recent weeks. He continued in a similar vein yesterday, reminding the crowds repeatedly of his record on job creation, poverty reduction and fiscal responsibility.

”I left you with four balanced budgets and surpluses," he said to applause in Newton, adding of the Bush administration, "They blew it."

But there were some moments of modesty. The more striking admission came in Kernersville, when the former president said: "I was well qualified to serve in the time in which I was elected. But we are now in two wars." For that scenario, he suggested, his wife was much better prepared.

The other moment of self-deprecation was more light-hearted.

Reflecting on the role his daughter Chelsea has played on the campaign trail, Clinton told the crowd in Newton, "She's turned out to be the family's best politician in some ways."

In contest after contest this primary season, we have seen the illusion of momentum, created by the spillover effect from recent results and whatever the dominant media narrative of the moment happens to be. So, for instance, when Barack Obama scored a clear win in Iowa and Hillary Clinton finished in third place, the Clinton Collapse instantly became the media’s obsession and Obama overtook Clinton in New Hampshire polls almost overnight. He had “the Big Mo.”

But then the voters actually went to the polls and produced a completely different result, one that thumbed its nose at Obama’s supposed momentum but that was actually in line with what expectations had been for months before Iowa. And this pattern has repeated itself several times.

Remember how Obama, the early underdog in Ohio and Texas, erased Clinton’s leads in both states on the strength of the momentum from his February winning streak and was poised to sweep to a pair of nomination-clinching wins? Or how the same basic story played out in Pennsylvania?

What has been most remarkable about this Democratic race is the degree to which support for both candidates was locked into place early on. Each has assembled a massive and distinct coalition defined largely by race, gender and economic status. There have been fluctuations in the candidates’ standing among various groups within their coalitions, but the basic fault lines have been impervious to big swings. In almost every state, the appearance of momentum behind one candidate has developed, only to disappear by primary day.

This has been a big help to Clinton in building an effective narrative as a tenacious, back-up-off-the-mat fighter. If at any point in 2007 it had been revealed that she would ultimately win New Hampshire by three points, few people would have been surprised. She seemed well positioned in the state and led in most every poll there. But when she was declared the winner by three points on primary night, it was a seismic, campaign-saving development for her—Obama’s perceived momentum had so lowered the bar for her. She had “come back.”

In the big picture, it’s similarly no surprise that she won Texas by four points, Ohio by 10 and Pennsylvania by nine, but because Obama was seen as surging in those states just before they voted, the value of victory multiplied for Clinton.

But now, finally, it may be Obama’s turn. In the same way that New Hampshire, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania were natural Clinton states, North Carolina is an Obama state, one where polls, until recently, gave him the kind of lead Clinton enjoyed in the early going in her states. And while Indiana is not quite a natural Obama state, it’s also not really a Clinton state. A close race, with either candidate winning, has long been expected there.

Which creates something of a silver lining in all the recent bad news for Obama, starting with the Pennsylvania results two Tuesdays ago. That verdict produced a torrent of “What’s wrong with Obama?” stories in the press and fed doubts about the certainty of his nomination this summer. A few days later came Jeremiah Wright’s reemergence, which began with his not-too-destructive appearance on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday only to turn worse—much worse—with his deliberately obnoxious National Press Club speech on Monday. Just as the Wright story peaked, there was word that Mike Easley, the popular Democratic governor of North Carolina, was throwing his support behind Clinton, fueling talk that the state might suddenly be within her reach.

And now the polls are catching up to the stories. In Indiana, Clinton’s lead has edged up to high single digits, even 10 points in one poll, a clear change from pre-Pennsylvania numbers that had the contest dead even. And Obama’s once overwhelming North Carolina advantage has been cut to single digits, with Clinton even moving into a tiny lead in one new poll.

For the first time, it is Clinton, and not Obama, who has the perceived momentum heading into a major test on her opponent’s natural turf. That, combined with her increasingly unfavorable delegate and popular-vote math, means that she’ll pretty much need a big win in Indiana and a win, or at least a near-miss, in North Carolina not to be considered a failure. This was not the standard before Pennsylvania.

Conversely, Obama is now in Clinton’s usual position, battered by the news media’s narrative of the moment and facing plummeting numbers in states he’s supposed to win. If he ends up pulling off a sizable win in North Carolina and either winning or finishing a close second in Indiana, the story will be that he went through a rough patch but that the voters came back to him—even though these margins are completely in keeping with what was always expected in both states before Pennsylvania.

There are reasons to believe that Obama will be able to outperform the now-lowered expectations for him. For one thing, the polls now coming out mainly reflect Obama’s standing at his lowest point of the last week. The effect of his denunciation of Wright on Tuesday and of several relatively Wright-free days—assuming the coming days are, in fact, Wright-free—is not yet apparent in any of the data.

Then there’s Obama’s mini-wave of superdelegate endorsements, capped by the attention-grabbing news on Thursday that Bill Clinton’s handpicked D.N.C. chairman from the late ‘90s has jumped ship from Clinton to Obama. These stories figure to reinforce confidence among wavering Obama backers that he is still in control of the race, his recent struggles notwithstanding.

And finally there is the basic pattern that has defined this race: What is true in most states a month before primary day generally ends up being a more reliable barometer than what is true a week before primary day. The polls swing and the narratives shift, but each time, most voters have ended up back where they’ve always been expected to be.

If they do that next Tuesday, it will be a very good day for Obama.