Across the pond

Americans are now in bed, even those on the west coast. I woke early, prompted by a need to discover what the Pennsylvanians did yesterday. First stop was the one man blog, the Drudge Report, since I knew he would have waited up for a clear result, even if the east coast newspapers had gone to bed. The essential message is blazoned in red bang in the middle of his opening screen. Clinton 55 per cent, Obama 45 per cent. And on top left Matt Drudge has a link to Fox News, which leads with a claim from Hillary Clinton that the tide is now turning in her favour. Here are Fox’s first two paragraphs:

Hillary Clinton declared the “tide is turning” Tuesday after scoring a critical victory in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, pushing the race ever forward to the nine remaining contests.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton had 55 percent and Barack Obama had 45 percent, a comfortable enough margin to deny critics their demand that she quit the race.

 Next stop the Wall St Journal, which did have a reporter still awake at 12.58 AM, Eastern Standard Time. They give the precise figures, which are Clinton 54.8 per cent, Obama 45.2 per cent, a lead of 9.6 per cent. Their comment is rather different:

Clinton kept her presidential candidacy alive with a decisive victory in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, but she failed to get the blowout she needed to derail front-runner Obama even after a bruising contest.

The truth is probably in between. The dominant view was that to regain the initiative Hillary Clinton had to do at least as well as her 11 per cent victory in the neighbouring state of Ohio. She was expected to win Pennsylvania, the Deerhunter state, which has a large number of white working class voters whose lives have been blighted by the decline of the old manufacturing industries. So she hardly turned the tide. But Obama’s claim last night that ‘he had closed the gap’ sounds distinctly hollow. Although he is now virtually certain to end up with more than half of the pledged delegates, he has not yet got sufficient votes to win the nomination outright. And the unpledged delegates, mostly senior Democrats, have the right to change their votes right up to the convention at the end of August.

The big question is what enabled Hillary Clinton to shorten Obama’s lead at the last big fence in this race. As America voted yesterday the media was highlighting a television interview, in which Hillary Clinton, said she would use nuclear weapons to strike against Iran, if Iran attacked Israel. Maybe that brought out a lot of voters worried about national security.

But only maybe. Not a few Americans are as worried as people this side of the pond about such inflammatory statements, which make Clinton sound more hawkish than John McCain, and quite as sabre rattling as George W Bush.