A presidential campaign is a series of turning points, and for Hillary Clinton, a crucial one came at 9:46pm here on Tuesday night in a ballroom seven stories above midtown Manhattan.
"Holy (expletive)!" shouted Clinton aide Doug Hattaway as the big screen in the room flashed the news on CNN that the candidate had won the Massachusetts primary. "Look at that!" The returns showed a 59 per cent to 38 per cent Clinton lead. The crowd roared, and the speakers blasted Big Head Todd and the Monsters' Blue Sky ("Yes, you can change the world").
Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had lent the family name to Barack Obama, and John Kerry, the state's other senator, had also campaigned vigorously for Clinton's opponent. Polls showed that Clinton's lead in the state had vanished - emblematic of a national Democratic primary race in which a surging Obama had rapidly closed the gap with Clinton and threatened to overtake her.
"She beat John Kerry and Ted Kennedy in their backyard," exulted Republican Anthony Wiener, New York, a Clinton supporter, as he worked the rows of cameras and microphones.
While the results of the 22-state Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses reflect a relatively close contest between Clinton and Obama, perhaps just as important are the intangibles: bragging rights and momentum. And after both campaigns forecast a draw earlier in the day, Clinton's campaign was well positioned to claim that it had bested expectations.
"Despite the fact that Obama visited Massachusetts just last night, Hillary Clinton won the state," trumpeted a news release from the campaign.
Celebrity surrogates fanned out in the ballroom to deliver a victory message. "Who do you want? I've got Governor Spitzer; I've got Rob Reiner," offered a young Clinton aide, as if vending hot dogs. We'll take one of each.
"It's a big, big night for Hillary," announced actor-cum-pundit Reiner. "The people of America are recognising that experience matters."
"She's going to be demonstrating a national base that's very hard to overcome," offered New York governor/pundit Eliot Spitzer. "The momentum is clearly in Senator Clinton's favour."
On paper it wasn't as tremendous a victory as all that. Obama quickly racked up victories in Georgia, Illinois, Alabama, Delaware, North Dakota, Connecticut and Kansas.
And, even in many states where he lost, he stayed competitive enough to keep himself close to parity in the race for delegates. But compared with expectations of a dead heat, Clinton's victory seemed clearer.
"I don't think that today is going to end up being decisive," Obama had declared on network television as the polls opened.
Clinton, also on the airwaves, found the whole thing "mystifying, because none of us really understand what the impact of all of these contests on one day will be for any of us".
With the possibility of a "knockout punch" essentially absent, Super Tuesday turned into Spin Tuesday, as both campaigns sought to define victory.
The Clinton campaign struck first with a conference call for reporters with strategists Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson.
"There are going to be lots of different ways you can look at this and decide who a winner is and who a loser is," Wolfson proposed.
Not surprisingly, Wolfson had some suggestions. "If Senator Obama doesn't win Massachusetts, I think that would have to be a significant disappointment," he spun.
Obama, for his part, tried to set expectations in his favour. Casting his ballot in Chicago, he said that "Senator Clinton is the favourite - she was up 20 or 30 points in a lot of the states".
Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, sat down with reporters in Chicago to amplify that theme. "If it is very close tonight from a pledged delegate standpoint, that's a terrific moment for the campaign," he spun.
In truth, both campaigns had roughly the same expectations as they awaited the closing of the polls: deadlock. Predicting a campaign that would go "perhaps all the way to the convention", Wolfson forecast that Tuesday's voting would be "inconclusive", a point he repeated several more times until Copley News Service's George Condon informed him that "four times you said that tonight will be inconclusive".
The exit polls, coming in after 5pm, appeared to confirm that view, showing many razor-thin races. "At the end of the night, it's going to be pretty close to a dead heat," CNN's Jack Cafferty declared on the televisions playing in the ballroom where the Clinton celebration was to occur.
At 7:30pm the Clinton campaign e-mailed a list of "Super Tuesday Talking Points". Among them: "To be sure, both campaigns have a long night ahead of them - but we feel very good about the numbers that we're seeing." That remained the company line until sometime after 9pm, when the Massachusetts and New Jersey victories came on top of Clinton's wins in New York, Arkansas, Tennessee and Oklahoma. The music pumped into the ballroom, and the surrogates swung into action. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey stood on a chair, giving an interview to a local TV station, waving a thumbs up and bopping to the music. A flock of members of Congress worked the microphones.
Off in a corner Republican Jerry Nadler of New York worked a calculator with aides, trying to figure out the delegate count. He still wasn't convinced Clinton would score a major win in delegates, but that was only part of the battle. "This gives us momentum," Nadler said. "It confounds expectations."
Out on the ballroom floor, adviser Hattaway was celebrating Clinton's triumph over the low expectations he helped to set. "I held out a kernel of hope that it would be like that," he said.