The New Nation - Internet Edition

Agency, Washington

It was a night of drama that offered all the epic themes of Campaign 2008 in crystallised form - victory and defeat, youth and experience, and even, when it came to the Texas voting system, chaos and confusion.

For once the Republicans should have had the better story to tell - John McCain wrapped up their nomination with a string of easy victories.

But it was the Democrats who once again grabbed the headlines with another Hillary Clinton comeback, throwing her party's race wide open once again.

Mrs Clinton won in Rhode Island and in the much larger state of Ohio (which has an uncanny knack of voting for candidates who go on to be president) - and above all, she won the popular vote in Texas.

It was a sweep of results that made a nonsense of predictions on the way in to the voting that she would be forced to withdraw from the race if she did not manage at least a couple of victories. She celebrated with one of her best speeches of the campaign so far.

It was one of the few evenings when she was more colourful and more passionate than her rival - dedicating her victory to "everyone who's ever been counted out, but refused to be knocked outtand everyone who works hard and refuses to give up".

Some of her rhetorical devices even felt as though they had been, let us say, inspired by Barack Obama.

He is fond of telling the story of a poor women who sent him a money-order for $3.01 to help him in his campaign.

Mrs Clinton now offers a mother of two little girls who sent her $10, and who wrote movingly of how she and her daughters cheer and chant along with the crowds whenever they see her on television.

It almost sounded like acknowledgement that Mrs Clinton knows she does best on days like this - when she is being written off by the media, and when Mr Obama's people are making a little too much of the argument that he is the front runner and that it is mathematically impossible for her to catch up with him in the delegate count.

It is curious that it is now Obama, the poetic candidate whose sweeping rhetoric can lift huge crowds, who is left to make that rather cold mathematical argument based on the way his party uses proportional representation to choose its candidates, while Mrs Clinton revels for the first time in months in the feeling that momentum is with her.

We can make a guess at the tone of the campaign to come now, too.

Mrs Clinton put Mr Obama under pressure in the last couple of weeks and it seemed to work.

Look out for a few more examples of going negative - we will soon see if Mr Obama fights back in kind or if he has a glass jaw.

It may well be that even in Ohio and Texas, Mrs Clinton shares the available delegates almost equally with her rival, but her supporters will argue that hardly matters.

For the Clinton Camp, 4 March was all about stopping Obama's seemingly unstoppable progress to the nomination and denting the sense of mystique and inevitability that he was starting to develop.

The Texas Democratic voting system, by the way, is maddeningly slow to yield up its final results - the state uses a system which is jokingly referred to as the "Texas two-step" in which voters are asked to take part first in a conventional election - the primary - and then, hours later, in a long, argumentative discussion system - a caucus.

When too many people turn up, the only result you get for hours, is total chaos.

In a sense, though, the final figures are not important.

Mrs Clinton's performance should be enough to persuade any "super delegates" who were thinking of backing Mr Obama to pause for a while and to see what happens next.

Hillary Clinton

16 states, 1,391 delegates: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas

Barack Obama

24 states, 1,477 delegates: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington state, Wisconsin

2,025 delegates needed for nomination.