Despite Hillary Clinton's victory yesterday, the Democratic party is likely to nominate for president a candidate who lost primaries in large, key states like California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One reason this will happen is that Obama leads in states won and in pledged delegates. That is because he has won - in addition to primary victories in places like Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, and Maryland - almost every one of the caucuses held so far. And he has won many of them - dominated by antiwar grassroots activists hostile to Sen. Clinton - by significant margins. He won Alaska 75 percent to 25 percent, for example; Hawaii 76 percent to 24 percent; Nebraska 68 percent to 32 percent. He also won the Texas caucuses by 12 points. Those margins of victory translate into Obama's probably insurmountable lead among pledged delegates.

When the history of this primary campaign is written, therefore, a major theme will be the Clinton campaign's hubris. It was hubristic to believe that the backing of the party establishment and a sense of "inevitability" meant that grassroots organizing at the state level was unnecessary. It was hubristic to assume that the nomination fight would be over by February 5 - an assumption which led to confusion, the misallocation of resources in the post-Super Tuesday One states, and Obama's string of victories that month.

Thanks to demographics and Obama's past few bad weeks, Clinton now has a (slim) second chance. But all of this could have been avoided. If her campaign had treated the caucuses seriously and won a fair share of them, Hillary Clinton would now be the Democratic nominee for president.

(Thanks to WEEKLY STANDARD intern Robin E. Wright, who helped research this blog.)