Obama adds three more primary victories

WASHINGTON — It's not just that she keeps getting beat.

Hillary Clinton's been getting clobbered, losing again to Barack Obama Tuesday night by stunning margins in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Obama's wins give him only a slight edge in the all-important delegate math. But make no mistake, he is opening up a massive lead in the intangibles — like enthusiasm, energy and just plain looking like a winner — that sets him on a course toward the nomination that will be difficult for Clinton to stop.

"The reality here is that it's beginning to solidify more in Obama's direction," said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. "This sort of sense that she could turn everything around instantly — this Indiana Jones routine where you save yourself right at the end — I just don't know that that's true."

On the Republican side, John McCain survived a scare from Mike Huckabee to take Virginia, though far more narrowly than polls suggested — a further sign of conservative discontent with McCain that will pester him as long as Huckabee stays in the race.

McCain won in Maryland and the District, enough to give him a near-mathematical lock on the nomination, but any hopes he had of dispensing with Huckabee were complicated by the former Arkansas governor's late surge in Virginia.

For Clinton, Tuesday night's results were a dramatic comedown from her days as the undisputed frontrunner, but they weren't a complete surprise. She had hinted at losing all three and already staked her White House hopes on March 4 races in Ohio and Texas.

But the breadth of Obama's victories showed that something was shifting unmistakably in the campaign, that the coalition Clinton had used to fight Obama to a tie on Super Tuesday is crumbling right when she needs it most.

If Obama can replicate some of the numbers he achieved last night in Virginia — beating Clinton handily among women and among voters making less than $50,000, two previously reliable pro-Clinton voting blocs — it's hard to see how she can deny him the nomination.

Beyond the numbers, there was also a sense of two campaigns going in opposite directions — with the one who expected to have the whole thing wrapped up on Super Tuesday seeming flat-footed and exhausted, riven by money woes and a new top-level departure.