Well, Tuesday's election was a bit of a disappointment for Barack Obama, but for a conservative like me, it was a hoot.
I love it.
Hillary Clinton's "comeback" was the best thing that could have happened for conservatives.
The best thing that could have happened for Democrats would have been for Hillary to lose and gracefully bow out, making Barack the nominee.
But no. She won the popular vote in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. Barack won Vermont.
But it wasn't by a landslide.
Hillary won the popular vote in Ohio by 10 points - 55 to 45.
But under the Demo scheme of things, that only meant a net gain of nine delegates from Ohio, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Hillary ended up with 74 delegates and Barack got 65.
In Rhode Island, it was plus 4 for Hillary, 12 to 8. In Vermont it was plus 3 Barack, 9 to 6.
In Texas, the popular vote margin was 51-49. This netted Hillary 65 delegates and Barack 61. Plus 4 for Hillary - so far.
I say so far because there were a couple delegates still undecided in Ohio and the Texas caucuses weren't finished counting votes.
(Texas came up with an even-whackier-than-normal-for-Democrats scheme for apportioning delegates. Some are granted via popular vote, some by caucus.)
The Texas caucuses are no small potatoes in Tuesday's voting.
They account for more than 63 - fully one-third - of Texas' 193 delegates.
As I'm writing this on Thursday, Obama was leading by 12 points in the Texas caucuses - 56 to 44 percent - 39 percent of precincts reporting.
I know I'm tossing around a lot of numbers, but the net effect of all this is quite fascinating to me.
The bottom line in all this is that when you do the math. Hillary can't win.
Even after Tuesday's victories, she's still behind in popular vote, number of states won and pledged delegates - 1,562 to 1,461, according to the Associated Press count.
The future really isn't much brighter for Hillary going forward.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Hillary wins by landslide margins in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. (That's highly unlikely. If she wins at all, it will be close.)
Then let's say she wins by narrower margins in Mississippi, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina and South Dakota.
Even if all that happens, she still trails Barack in popular votes and pledged delegates.
The only way she can win is if she can twist enough superdelegate arms to thwart the will of the American Democrat voters.
There are 796 superdelegates, two-fifths of whom are elected officials. The rest are a bunch of party hacks and loyalists.
So far, Hillary has the support of 242 superdelegates while Barack has 207 supporting him.
But those superdelegates are more heavily weighted than just an everyday average delegate elected by a voter.
Oh yeah, and she also has to convince Howard Dean and the rest of the Democrat National Committee to break their own rules and count the delegates she won in Michigan and Florida - even though all the candidates, the states and the DNC itself agreed earlier that they wouldn't count.
But it was easy to agree to those rules when everybody thought Hillary was the unchallengeable heir apparent.
To be sure, it's an uphill climb for Hillary. Well, more like a trek up Everest in a pant suit and heels, but you know what? I wouldn't count her out. The Clinton machine is pretty darn well-oiled.
*****
As well-oiled as the machine is, at least one cog lost a tooth after the Ohio primary election. Somebody needs to fact-check Hillary's blatherings a little more closely.
After being declared the winner in Ohio, Hillary proclaimed, "No person has ever won the White House without winning the Ohio primary, in either party. .. Somehow the people of Ohio end up picking the winners."
It didn't take long for Ohio newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer to run that one through the truth detector.
1912 - Demo Judson Harmon beat out New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson went on to win the presidency.
1932 - Demo George White wins the Democratic Ohio primary. Franklin D. Roosevelt goes on to become president.
1952 - GOP'er Robert Taft won the primary. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who won the presidency, was not on the Ohio primary ballot.
1960 - Demo Michael DiSalle, won the primary. John Kennedy won the presidency.
1968 - Gov. James A. Rhodes controlled all 58 delegates to the GOP convention, withholding his votes until it became apparent that Richard Nixon would win the nomination.
The Plain Dealer also noted that more recently, Ohio primary voters have gone with the eventual winner of the presidential race. But then the newspaper quoted Andrew Cayton, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio who said this factoid is virtually meaningless. In recent years, Ohio has typically held its primaries late in the election season, by which time a winner has already emerged.
Ah details, details.
All in all, this is shaping up to be a pretty interesting election.
