John Nichols | Hillary Clinton celebrated Tuesday as if her eight-point Pennsylvania win was a landslide. It wasn't. And the battle with Obama goes on to Indiana, North Carolina and beyond.
Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary, and something akin to formal permission to continue campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Clinton's winning margin of 55-45 represents a credible victory, if not perhaps so dramatic a finish as was needed to fundamentally change the reality that the senator from New York is unlikely to win the Democratic nod.
Clinton was not worrying about the fine points of the final numbers, however. On Tuesday night, she celebrated as if Pennsylvania had handed her a landslide. And she urged Democratic donors to recognize this big-state win as a call to write the checks her campaign needs to replenish electioneering coffers that are essentially empty.
"We still have a lot of work ahead of us," Clinton told thousands of cheering supporters in Philadelphia. "But if you're ready, I'm ready."
Obama supporters will say their man did better than expected in Pennsylvania, a state where Clinton always led. And they'll be right.
Obama supporters will say that her Pennsylvania win will only net Clinton another 14 to 16 delegates -- meaning that she will have to win upcoming primaries by impossibly wide margins to beat their man's solid delegate lead. And they'll be right.
But Hillary Clinton will worry about all that later.
In Pennsylvania, she was going not so much for a particular margin or a precise bump in her delegate total but for a perception. And she got it.
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