A great day for John McCain

After eight disastrous years of George Bush, and with a Republican candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing about the economy and thinks the US will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face-off in the autumn is if there is a protracted internecine battle. Any Democrat with any memory of kindred blood-lettings in the past should shiver as history begins to repeat itself.

The press is blaring tidings of a great Clinton comeback in Ohio and Texas last night, both states in which she had 20-point leads in late February. But in terms of delegates Barack Obama is ahead by what appears to be an insurmountable margin.

The only way Hillary can win the nomination is to savage Obama with calumnies, bloodying him to a point where the Clintons can make the case to the super-delegates

at the Democratic convention in the last week of August that, in a race against McCain, Obama has already been fatally wounded.

It's a course to which the Clinton campaign is now totally committed, exactly along the lines advocated by Mark Penn, Hillary’s pollster and chief strategist.

Penn's policy has been the antithesis of Roosevelt's grand coalition of the 1930s. Already in South Carolina, Clinton was willing to throw the black vote overboard. In Texas, she exploited Hispanic-black animosities.

Obama has plenty to be rueful about. He managed the astounding feat of being on the defensive in Ohio about trade, at the hands of a Clinton. The history of the late 1980s and 1990s was the Clintons at the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing that the free trade agreements were essential to America's future.

Ohio, devastated by job flight, was treated to the spectacle of the Obama campaign failing on this very issue, because Obama shrank from making the full case against what Clinton did to working people in the