BARACK Obama woke up Tuesday morning with hopes of vanquishing his last remaining rival and claiming the Democratic presidential nomination. He ended the day with two stubborn opponents: Hillary Clinton - vowing to continue her campaign after big victories in Rhode Island and Ohio - and a long-delayed but growing media backlash against his candidacy. The second one may be more threatening than the first. Despite breaking Obama's string of 11 victories, Clinton is likely to gain only a modest boost in delegates and will have a hard time erasing his lead in delegates. And the Democratic party leaders who make up the party's “superdelegates” will feel pressure to validate the will of the people, meaning that Obama remains the front-runner for the nomination. But for the first time in his improbable rise, Obama himself became the main issue in the campaign - and the voters' response wasn't encouraging. Obama had built up a 75,000-vote lead in early voting in Texas, only to see Clinton erase it with a strong comeback in the last few days; exit polls showed that late-deciding voters chose her over him by a 2-1 ratio. A last-minute Clinton TV ad questioning Obama's ability to maintain national security may have helped her; so too did his own mishandling of a controversy over his aide's alleged comments to Canadian officials suggesting Obama wasn't serious about renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton, in what may be her first memorable phrase of the long campaign, accused Obama of giving voters the old “wink-wink” - promising something he didn't intend to deliver. And Obama suddenly was on the defensive. “It seems clear that Clinton had the better of the last few days of the campaign,” said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. As a result, he said, Clinton is unlikely to face as much pressure to withdraw from the race, setting up another showdown in Pennsylvania on April 22. The long wait for Pennsylvania will give both campaigns a chance to rearm themselves with money and issues. But compared with previous chapters in this drawn-out epic of an election year, Obama will almost certainly be receiving greater scrutiny than Clinton. For two months, the Illinois senator dominated the national zeitgeist with his “yes, we can” message of hope and change, a phenomenon celebrated in YouTube videos and T-shirts. But his recent return to earth coincided with the settling of the TV writers' strike and the reemergence of late-night comedy shows as a political force. Comics are quick to impose a story line and make it stick: Their jokes spring from common knowledge about the candidates - John McCain's age, Clinton's marital troubles, Mike Huckabee's frequent professions of faith. “Saturday Night Live,” the granddaddy of all political comedy shows, chose to build its Obama narrative around the idea that reporters were completely in his thrall. And its skits - on both Feb. 23 and March 1 - presented Obama as an amiable guy inflated to hero status by a worshipful media. Clinton, by contrast, was presented as annoying but indefatigable - a scrappy underdog whose complaints of unfairness got laughed off by the media. As if to drive home the point, Tina Fey used the Feb. 23 “Weekend Update” segment to deliver a thinly veiled exhortation to young women to quit Obama and get with the Hillary bandwagon. “In less than a minute, the SNL skit crystallized Hillary's complaints (about unfair media treatment) and upgraded them from mere media inside baseball to the conventional wisdom,” said Matthew Felling, former media analyst for CBS.com. Clinton was quick to seize on the skit as proof of her point - mentioning it in last week's debate in Ohio and then flying to New York for a cameo appearance on the show last Saturday. The SNL appearance, followed by a stint on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Monday night, seemed to clear some of the gloom from around Clinton; her poll numbers began improving late last week. Still, her impressive wins in Ohio and Rhode Island and her battle for Texas only put her where the polls had had her a few weeks earlier, before Obama's campaign blanketed the states with ads and staffers. Rhode Island and Ohio were her turf, and she held it. She can feel relieved to be going on to Pennsylvania, but Obama remains the main focus of the race. If he can handle it. __
