The disappointing result from yesterday's primaries signals the death of the politics of hope for this election cycle. It now seems clear that voters will reward candidates who smear and focus more on the reasons not to vote for their opponent than on why they should be elected. Unfortunately, the result of this will be that the Obama campaign will rightly hit Clinton where she is most vulnerable...my guess is that it will not be pretty.
Whether or not this works may be beside the point. The enthusiasm among young Obama supporters and other newcomers to politics may become soured to the point they become dissilusioned with the whole mess and fail to support either winning candidate come November.
Perhaps this represents a structural failure with the American political system. While the party decides the election mechanisms it is up to individual candidates to use them to sway voters. This emphasizes winning whatever the cost over demonstrated leadership.
A parlimentary systems requires party candidates to win their districts by representing their constituents effectively, but selects their leaders through demonstrated ability to lead the party and promote it's agenda. They vet their potential leaders by making them earn it through the party apparatus. We seem hell-bent on vetting our leaders by seeing how much mud they can wade through without getting dirty. I don't really care which method is more fair only which is more effective.
Given the last 7 years of "W" and perhaps the prospect of 4 years of McCain, owing to a damaged victorious democratic candidate and the dissilusionment of the supporters of the defeated, I fear we may be in for another lesson about which vetting process promotes leadership and which promotes partisan marginalizing, dirty campaigning, and scare tactics. Thus hope in the american political process is extinguished for another few years...