Last week (or a century ago), Barack Obama got in a bunch of trouble for making a "gaffe", which is a inside joke/cliche word political journalists use when a candidate accidentally (and inelegantly) says something he or she actually believes, and then the journalists beat up on the candidate for a month or so over it. His gaffe was that he said white blue-collar people seek solace in cultural identifiers like religion and guns when the economy fails them. Regardless of whether you find that to be a condescending notion, it seems harder to argue with his statement that these voters are "bitter," because everyone in America is "bitter" these days. Still, it became known as "bittergate," and it topped the headlines last week just as Hillary's snipergate did the week before. Obama is an elitist, we were told, over and over and over again. Elitist! And latte-sipping! Someone (Dowd?) probably called him "effete," too. After a full week of hammering this point home, that Obama is elitist, Hillary pulled ahead of Obama in the national polls for the first time in months, finally. She pulled ahead one point, on Saturday. And on Sunday, Obama was back ahead by 2. Pennsylvania's primaries are tomorrow (FINALLY THANK JESUS) but they won't solve this horrible horrible mess.

Hillary will almost certainly "win." Probably by a little bit or maybe a lot, but Obama is already managing the expectations game, just like Clinton does so well, so it could eventually be spun as anyone's win or loss. Oh, and also, she can't bridge the pledged delegate gap no matter what she does, so all she can really do here is convince Superdelegates that this last week and Pennsylvania's primary proved that Obama's a big failure. She'll need a pretty large margin, probably, especially since she didn't manage to get as much political traction out of this bitter thing as she'd hoped.

But this will all continue more or less unchanged for another two months, probably. And then McCain will win and we will have war with everyone, forever, or at least until McCain is felled by a rage-induced aneurysm and VP Charlie Crist is forced to take over. Then it will basically be a nonstop gay pride parade in America.