Well, so much for any chance of putting the Democratic race to rest.
As I write this, minutes before deadline, the votes have just began to trickle in, and all signs point to extremely close races in both Ohio and Texas.
Ohio seems likely to narrowly go to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and Texas is on the edge of a knife. Whether or not Clinton pulls out Texas tonight, one thing seems clear: This campaign will continue on at least until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
Feel free to groan.
I'm obsessed with elections, and I'm sick of this primary, too.
The truth is, so long as the Clinton camp feels it has a shred of a sliver of a chance at attaining this nomination, it will continue to fight. And that shred of a sliver came in timely fashion over the past few days, which have seen a reversal of some of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) momentum in the face of some bad media cycles.
Obama has had to contend with the beginning of the high-profile trial of corrupt Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko, whose ties to Obama, while tenuous, have been played up by a newly invigorated Clinton campaign.
Adding to Obama's woes is a brewing scandal dubbed NAFTA-quiddick; namely, an accusation that Obama's campaign secretly told the Canadian ambassador that the campaign's talk of re-negotiating NAFTA was a throwaway line to please union voters in Ohio and that, not to worry, they have no intention of following through.
Inside baseball that 99 percent of voters wouldn't normally hear or care about? Absolutely. Potential trouble when it's all a bored press corps has to talk about on a slow news day? Definitely. And the past few days have been slow.
The biggest recent problem for Obama in Ohio and Texas, though, has been a media willing to endlessly replay Clinton's "3:00 a.m." ad. The ad, a spot asking viewers who they would trust picking up a White House emergency phone at 3:00 in the morning to handle some developing catastrophe, makes the implicit accusation that Obama is simply not up to the job of commander-in-chief.
Because it's edgy, sort of negative, and is the closest Clinton has come to saying straight-up that she has the experience to be president and he doesn't, it made ripples in a press corps that is as bored as I am by a Democratic race that just won't end.
The thing about free publicity is, well, it's free. It costs Obama and Clinton millions to run campaign commercials in a state as big and expensive as Texas or Ohio, and the press is doing it for free, ensuring every voter who missed the ad during its initial run would see it on the rebound. Even better, someone discovered a 1984 Walter Mondale ad that sounded suspiciously similar to Clinton's ad.
Why is this good for Clinton? Because it meant another round of news coverage, another round of replaying the ad endlessly.
Clinton's astonishing $35-million dollar haul in February is impressive, but when you're up against Obama's $50-million dollar take, free media may have made all the difference.
Michael Sherry is a junior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Michael.Sherry@tufts.edu.
