She's Baaaack! So Hillary wins Rhode Island, Texas and Ohio! You have to give her credit—she won't go away without a fight.

The MSM will hastily try to tell you what this all means. It was the telephone ad; women voters; Latino voters; doubts about Obama; NAFTA; focus on the economy; late-deciding voters; and so on.

Myself, I don't think the MSM has a clue what's going on, and I'm continually impressed by how unsophisticated its analysis is.

Last night, for example, I was watching Bill Schneider on CNN talk about how late-deciding voters were breaking for Hillary by something like a 3-1 margin. That's a potentially important fact. But what Schneider never bothered to mention was how many late-breaking voters there were, and which way they had been leaning before last weekend. Had they once been solid Hillary voters who actually started to consider Obama? Or were they Obama defections? Were they people who didn't usually vote in primaries? (Probably true in Texas, whose primary hasn't mattered much for decades.)

Another example: The political analysts are so quick to break voters down into race. What an sadly American instinct! It would be fascinating to see them apply other filters: slicing up the electorate by income, region, age, political opinions, and so on. Race is surely relevant, but the media's obsession with it ensures less focus on the other demographic elements that could influence a person's vote.

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom that seems dead wrong to me: Every day the Democratic primary goes on is a good day for John McCain.

You hear this boilerplate from every talking head on TV.

I'm not so sure.

For one thing, this kind of ongoing primary fight has never happened in any of these reporters' careers, so no one really has any prior knowledge on which to base this conclusion.

Second, every day the campaign goes on, Obama and Clinton dominate the news, and McCain, I suspect, will find himself struggling to compete with that. He's already sounded sort of pathetic as he tries to shoehorn his way into the Democratic debate.

Third, polls have consistently shown that Democratic voters very much like both their potential picks. So an ongoing campaign needn't be a bloodbath (unless Hillary sees her victories as an endorsement of her go-negative strategy).

Fourth, I wonder how state party machines will benefit from actually getting to work before a general election—will they be more smoothly oiled machines come Election Day than if they had only symbolic primaries, as in 2004, 2000, and so on?

This Democratic primary doesn't seem to have diminished the stature of these two figures—quite the opposite.

This idea that an ongoing debate that attracts record numbers of voters and viewers is bad for the Democrats—I'm not so sure. Isn't it worse to have an early lock on the nomination and leave people with no reason to pay attention to you?  ¶ 6:47 AM