Last Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania played out largely as the players and pundits expected. Hillary won but not by enough to claim she’s back or to deliver a damaging blow to her opponent. Nor did Obama make enough of an impression to solidify his position as front-runner or show he could win votes among key demographics.

But now, almost a week after the ballot, parts of the commentariat are reporting the result as a turning point of sorts. While only a marginal win for Hillary in votes and delegates, it might have been a more significant win in terms of the intangibles of the contest: the all-important momentum, and the support of powerbrokers from within various branches of the American media and political systems.

And complicating matters for Obama, The Australian this morning reports that “The shadow of Jeremiah Wright has again fallen over Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democrat presidential nomination, with the radical Chicago pastor deciding to embark on a speaking tour in the run-up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.” With friends like Wright …

The demographics of victory, or defeat: Pennsylvania certainly didn’t show Obama at his finest. Not only did Clinton beat him by a significant margin (54.7 per cent to 45.3 per cent), but Obama continued to do poorly among particular groups: women, senior citizens and workers, especially white workers.– Spiked Online

Media jump ship from Obama to Clinton: In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the Obama campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the message — that Obama is a likely loser in the general election — that Hillary and her allies have been promoting for the past six weeks. The new tenor of media coverage is visible almost everywhere, from Politico, Time and The New Republic to The Washington Post and The New York Times. For Hillary, the shift is a potential lifesaver as she struggles to keep her head above water; without it, she would, metaphorically, drown. — Thomas B. Edsall, Huffington Post

Ad wars: Obama buys more, Clinton sets tempo: Obama outspent Clinton on ad buys in Pennsylvania by slightly more than 2-to-1, and Tracey says Obama is outspending his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination by about the same ratio in Indiana and North Carolina, which hold primaries May 6. But is Obama getting bang for the buck? Clinton “has been able to dictate the tempo in the last few contests, be that Texas, Ohio and then Pennsylvania,” said (Evan Tracey of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, CNN’s consultants on campaign commercials. – Paul Steinhauser, CNN

Whither the Obamacans I? I hear Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod make a startling admission in an NPR interview: “Let’s understand that the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections going back to even to the Clinton years.” This is truly amazing. Just a few months ago, Obama was presenting himself as a transformational liberal leader who could not only win the election, but create a coalition for change by appealing to voters who haven’t traditionally voted Democratic … If there’s one enduring effect that this protracted Democratic primary has had, it has turned Obama into a conventional liberal. Even if elected, the idea that he could be a progressive Ronald Reagan capable of changing the trajectory of history now seems remote. – Philip Klein, American Spectator

Wither the Obamacans II? On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, an e-mail from Obama press secretary Bill Burton hit my in-box at 11:21 p.m., announcing pithily in its subject line the essence of the message that the campaign would deliver relentlessly in the days ahead: “A fundamentally unchanged race.” On a number of levels, this spin had the virtue of comporting with reality. It was true that Hillary Clinton’s win had done little to erode Obama’s nearly insurmountable pledged-delegate advantage … What was not true, however, was that the outcome in Pennsylvania had changed nothing of importance. As the next few days would prove in spades, Clinton’s victory had done more than allow her to fight another day. It had altered the narrative of the campaign, however temporarily. – John Heilemann, New York Magazine

Hillary and her old enemies cuddle up for a kill: Last week was officially the moment that the race for the Democratic nomination slipped through the looking glass into surrealism. Here is a brief list of those people who are now actively supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: Pat Buchanan, a charming man slightly to the right of Genghis Khan; Rush Limbaugh, the most voluble and incendiary of right-wing talk-show hosts; Richard Mellon Scaife, the media mogul who financed the virulently antiClinton crusades of the 1990s; and, if you read between the lines, even Karl Rove, the “architect” of the past decade or so of Republican dominance in electoral politics. Am I hallucinating? I promise you I’m not. The merging of the forces that once persecuted the Clintons with the Clinton campaign itself has been a wonder to behold. Some on the once solidly anti-Clinton right have even been directly urging people to register as Democrats to vote for her. – Andrew Sullivan, Times Online