The Obamanaut continued through the Chesapeake Valley tonight, with the Illinois Senator trouncing Mrs. Clinton in Virginia, Maryland, and the nation’s capital. “Trouncing” is almost charitable. His margins were the stuff of 1960s Mike Mansfield-era Senate votes:  60-37 (Maryland) , 75-24 in the District of Columbia, and, in the one state where there was some speculation she might pull a New Hampshire Surprise, defying the early polls and coming from behind to trounce Obama, and where even Obama’s people hoped for just a narrow victory, Hillary was carved up like a Virginia ham, 64 to 35.

It was a slaughter across the board. Barack’s lead in the pledged delegates is now outright. Just this week he’s even gained seven superdelegates to Hillary’s two. MSNBC’s Howard Fineman (who is no Anderson Cooper, even on his worst day) laid out his homework that no one on Clinton’s campaign could reasonably hope to finish the primary season with a lead in the pledged delegate. Norah O’Donnell’s exit polling indicated that white men are fleeing Hillary’s column as if she hired Celine Dion to perform at one of her rallies, and there are even fissures appearing in her previously rock-solid Hispanic bloc, as Obama took the Hispanic vote in Virginia 55-45. A Latino analyst from Texas reported that Obama got boots on the ground across the state already, opening offices in Austin, Waco, and other cities a week before Hillary. He won Catholics in Maryland, and on and on and on.

Chuck Todd’s own math was just as bleak for the Clinton campaign (I didn’t watch boo on FOX News tonight. I’m detoxing this week and don’t feel well enough to subject myself to that, and they were just going to lead with McCain-Huckabee anyway). She has to win Texas and Ohio and practically every remaining state with nearly 60% of the vote to surmount Obama’s delegate lead (a virtual impossibility, it would seem, on the face of Obama’s bigger and bigger rallies sticking a finger in the face of fire marshals and physics as he continues to pack tens of thousands of fans into buildings that are used to comfortably seating considerably thinner crowds, like Milwaukee Bucks fans). Her trump card has always been up to this point that she still held the lead in the popular vote. Before tonight, she in fact did hold a 400,000 vote lead in the popular vote if you counted Florida and Michigan (which, for the let’s-get-this-party-stunted reasons for which the Democrats are so destructively notorious, did not award any delegates because they dared to defy the party machinery and move their primaries up to January). That was before tonight. Obama took a fire axe to Clinton in tonight’s contests wiping out that nearly half-million vote lead in three fell swoops.

In the kind of tactical move that worked out so well for her in Iowa, Hillary is showing a similar bread-basket disdain for the voters in Wisconsin by deploying her resources to Texas and Ohio and practically conceding the Badger State to Obama. There have been many fools who have put their money against Hillary only to soon be parted from it, but she’s running out of game clock, and the arena is getting very loud against her.

Okay, it wasn’t all Mandingo or Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, but after so much venom and eye-gouges and groin-punches, the two 2008 Democratic Presidential survivors achieved an almost sultry detente. With a lingering hug at the end, one could only imagine what Barack was whispering in Hillary’s ear. “Why don’t you ditch Bill tonight and come back to my hotel, and I’ll show you my ‘pole’ numbers.”

With the acrimony of the last few weeks between Senators Clinton and Obama, the pundits were portending an irreparable fracture within the Democratic Party. I was a little concerned that they were on the verge of following the age-old Democratic tendency to snatch defeat from the gnashing jaws of victory, but I never believed and still don’t that these two won’t wind up sharing a bumpersticker this fall.

The Hollywood backdrop and the plethora of stars that came out to watch the steamy tete-a-tete played right into Republican hands prompting derisions that started with an RNC statement last night and continuing on the right-wing talk radio shows today, rife with words like “pandering” and “Hollywood liberals” and “the liberal elite”.

It’s California, though, and no one’s immune to the star fucking. And, after the Republicans had their day in the sun with the endorsement of John McCain by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, all eyes and ears were on the Democratic celebrity luminaries to see who would win the nod from…Fran Drescher and Jason Alexander.

DEADWARDS: There wasn’t a room big enough to hold the love the candidates had for their erstwhile competitor, John Edwards, last night. One blogger snarkily remarked what a shame it was that Edwards had retired his Presidential bid just before he received such acclaim from his now-former competitors. For those among us who relish the nomination derby as much or more than we do the Super Bowl chase, it was a grand disappointment to see Edwards hang up his devilishly handsome, $400-a-snip locks and his potential role as kingmaker this summer in Denver by dangling his delegates over a deadlocked Hillary and Barack. Translation: “You were always my favorite competitor, and we were the most simpatico of the candidates despite our occasional differences–so PLEASE can I have your delegates and your endorsement???”

Among the politically masturbatory, there’s no bigger money shot than a brokered convention–where the candidates arrive at the convention this August with no clear nominee, and the also-ran(s), with their committed delegates that could be pledged to any of the surviving candidates, holding sway. The Republican race in 1976 between Governor Ronald Reagan and incumbent President Gerald Ford came down to the Mississippi delegation, which ultimately went for the President and helped him win nomination on the first ballot.

Nothing would make seven or eight dozen pasty-faced wonks who drink too many energy drinks happier than to see either party’s candidates land in Denver or Minneapolis-St. Paul this summer with too few committed delegates to claim the nomination outright. That would be the next best thing to watching Jennifer Love Hewitt in a thong licking chocolate syrup off a buck-naked Salma Hayek.

It probably won’t happen with the Republicans, but there was some hope for the Democrats with Edwards still in the race. He was a nearly consistent third in every contest, save Iowa, but he was scraping together enough delegates that would have made him a potential kingmaker when the gavel fell in Denver this summer.

It could still happen. No one knows what magnitude Obama’s South Carolina momentum is going to assume coming into Super Tuesday, but the Obama endorsements are piling up like cord wood, he finished January having raised over $1 million a day, and, despite Hillary’s 17-point victory in non-counting Florida, which has been casting ballots since December, Obama actually won the race 46-38 among voters who cast their ballot within the three days leading up to the primary.

After watching Barack Obama’s victory speech in South Carolina last night, I felt like that poor embarrassed girl, looking around a strange bedroom for her underwear at 7:00 AM, her suitor having left for the office or an early lacrosse game, leaving a Yoplait and an apple on the nightstand with a note, “Had to run. Nice meeting you. Call me sometime, and please lock up when you leave.”

I pride myself on being a fairly cynical political observer. I was 21 and I still didn’t buy into Jesse Jackson’s charade in 1988 when my classmates were manning his tables and calling for a Jesse Jackson-Patricia Schroeder “dream ticket”, and I just shook my head in disappointment when I saw professors I respected standing in the front rows at his rallies shouting along with the “Up with hope! Down with dope!” call-and-response chants.

I don’t know how he got me to come home with him last night and take my clothes off. I was seduced, and I took leave of my better instincts. I sat there and watched him spin his mellifluous words about “the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us we have to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us…We are here to tonight to say, that this is not the America we believe in!” Good God, George Bush couldn’t even read all of that, much less speak it.

Judging by the crowds, the exit polling, and the “Republican party leaders” allegedly sending breathless text messages to Joe Scarborough’s Blackberry suggesting that Obama speaks real good and they’d not only let him near their country, but maybe even their daughters (maybe), I’m not the only one to take leave of my once-dependable jaded restraints. After more than seven years of listening to a bellicose Lennie Smalls represent us on the world and national stage, it’s refreshing to hear a President string together sentences with cadence and proper grammar and passion. Sure, there are Republicans who can speak, but it’s also a breath of fresh air not to listen to heartfelt oratory being deployed in the interests of keeping coupled homosexuals 150 yards away from Chuck E. Cheese, or what tiny brown-skinned civilization we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bomb back into the Mesozoic Age, even though our schools are in ruins and our children are in danger of growing up to sound like their President.

The Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton opponents have a valid argument. I was 14 the last time neither of them was in the White House. Not that I’m not nostalgic for the 1990s like many, but it gives me pause whether I want to spend the campaign and the next four or eight years listening to Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge spinning their Greatest Hits collections. After a decade of that I don’t care whether Hillary really did have Vince Foster murdered or not. Maybe she had her reasons.

Moreover, it would be great sport watching right wing talk radio flail about trying to make fun of a Barack Obama-Evan Bayh ticket. If all you have are Obama’s ears and Bayh’s corn-fed Midwestern Life & Casualty Rep blandness, that’s a pretty shallow well. Barack’s cocaine use? Yawn. The “Barack Hussein Obama” schtick is already more tired than Fred Thompson. And the madrasas charges have the legs of a sick, aging greyhound.

Most of the Limbaughs and Michael Savages and Glenn Becks aren’t funny on the best of days even when there’s more low-hanging fruit in front of them than they can fill five baskets with. The humor gene simply doesn’t do well in a Republican body, as Dennis Miller proved when he started marching with the Neo-Cons. It needs Shrillary and abortion-on-demand and gays-in-the-military and the Arkansas Mafia and John Kerry windsurfing and voting for the $87 million before he voted against it to survive in such an oppressive environment. Its chances are bleak in an Obama campaign or administration.

We’ll see how many more millions Barack seduces between now and Ultra-Bodacious, Did-You-See-The-Fucking-Size-Of-That Tuesday next week. But one thing is clear after this week: After decades on the prowl, the Clinton Sexy is dead in its trousers.

Somewhere on high a mischievous God is cackling to Himself, making pundipshits out of all of us know-it-all armchair political sages who left for work this morning already shoveling dirt on Hillary Clinton’s pallid, lifeless face. I guess we’re the same crowd that picked the Dolphins to contend this year.

As of 6:26 PM PST, Hillary’s moribund Presidential campaign appears to have made the biggest comeback since Meat Loaf (and, to many, the most unwelcome). Everyone who remembers Bill Clinton’s “Comeback Kid” speech during his 1992 loss in New Hampshire were already cringing in anticipation of Hillary taking what appeared could be a double-digit shellacking and proclaiming herself Lazarus in a pantsuit. God help us all if she actually pulls out a win, and we’re treated to Bill Clinton presenting her with a tiara and flowers and piling everyone into a U-Haul to drive down to D.C. and start ramming the gates of the White House.

The mantra all week has been that of Change Versus Experience, which may explain the still-unsettled numbers between Clinton and Obama, and why the battle returned to them after party insiders failed to draft Emo Phillips to compete for the nomination and couldn’t get permission from the estate of Hubert Humphrey to exhume the lifelong Democratic stalwart and place his name on the New Hampshire ballot.