The Campaign Will Continue

A couple of things are clear tonight, as the votes are being counted in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont.

* John McCain has wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination. How wildly improbable did that seem only a couple of months ago, when Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney were at the top and McCain was trailing badly in the Iowa caucuses? But McCain came back, won the New Hampshire primary, and the Arizona senator was on his way to the nomination.

And now, tomorrow, McCain apparently is going to go to the White House to receive the blessing of President Bush, the man who trashed him in South Carolina in 2000.

American politics is nothing if it's not entertaining.

* The Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama battle is going to continue. It may continue to the convention floor in Denver.

Obama did win in Vermont earlier tonight. For an African-American man to dominate in a state that is 95% white -- even a state as small as Vermont -- is no small accomplishment. But exit polls indicated that opposition to the Iraq War was one of the key issues for Democratic voters there, and that's an issue that plays well for Obama.

In the other states, Clinton may very well finish on top. She's already been declared the winner in Ohio -- at the moment, with about two-thirds of the vote counted in Ohio, Clinton has 57% and Obama has 41%.

The count in Rhode Island is nearly complete, and Clinton has won there, receiving 58% of the vote to Obama's 41%.

Here in Texas, it's been extremely close all evening. At one point, with nearly 1.5 million votes counted, the difference between the two was only a few hundred votes. Now, with nearly half the votes counted (about 1.8 million), Clinton's lead is a little more substantial (almost 30,000). She has 50% of the vote, while Obama has 48%.

Now, it seemed to me that, to make up the difference in delegates, Clinton needed to beat Obama by about 20 percentage points in each of the primaries being held today. Well, she came close to that in Ohio and Rhode Island. And she lost Vermont, which has only a handful of delegates, anyway.

But it's so close in Texas that I have to believe that, when we all wake up in the morning, Obama will still be in front in the delegate chase. But his margin will be smaller.

If Clinton holds on and wins Texas, though, she can claim to have won in every large state in the country except the state Obama represents in the Senate -- Illinois. That will make it difficult to deny her the nomination.

But it's still the delegate numbers that will make the decision. And I think that battle won't be decided until the convention.