Despite all the braying from nervous lefty pundits and pompous talking heads, who prematurely proclaimed the nomination battle over in February, the structure of the Democratic race simply did not allow for an early victory. On Tuesday, the voters chose to continue the race for at least another two months (up through Pennsylvania on April 22 and North Carolina and Indiana on May 6). Barack Obama is an impressive, exciting newcomer — but he isn’t yet the nominee. Hillary Clinton has just taken the first step along her path to the nomination. That path is certainly narrower and more harrowing than it looked at the start of the year, but it remains a viable one.

Clinton had several advantages going into Tuesday’s big prizes of Ohio and Texas. First, the Clinton team is tough, experienced, and willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to win a nomination to which the Clintons feel morally entitled. When my own boys, aged 10 and 7, came home from school the other day and asked how “the Muslim” was doing in the presidential race, I knew that the Clintons’ viral marketing was infecting the broader population. Second, while journalists seem personally to dislike Clinton and adore Obama, their institutional interests clearly lay in playing down his February victories and playing up her March ones. If you’re in the news business, you tend to pine for news.

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Third: When John McCain became the presumptive Republican nominee, it spotlighted the open question of whether voters would accept Obama, the freshman senator, as a believable alternative to McCain as commander-in-chief. Clinton grabbed this spotlight and focused it so tightly that it began to singe Obama around the edges. You can see the effects in the Ohio and Texas exit polls showing Clinton favored over Obama as most qualified to be commander in chief (even by a number of Obama voters) as well as the fact that late deciders in both states broke for Clinton, probably in part because of the security and leadership issues she and her surrogates brought up.

Finally, Ohio and Texas offered Clinton relatively favorable territory— – lots of older, downscale voters and, in the latter case, Hispanics. She won nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, which was itself nearly a third of the Texas electorate. Democrats privately talk a lot about racial tensions between blacks and Hispanics, so perhaps now the issue will get broader public attention.

The spin from Team Obama is that Clinton’s popular-vote margins weren’t really the story, that not only did she not make up much ground in the delegate count on Tuesday but that it is mathematically impossible for her to win the nomination. Baloney. Ever since Super Tuesday, the race was always going to be decided by superdelegates. Their preferences, in turn, were going to be shaped in part by delegate gains from the coming primaries and caucuses, in part by the popular vote totals, and in part by the fate of Clinton’s attempts to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida.

Will Clinton successfully traverse this narrow, winding path to the Democratic convention in Denver? I truly have no idea. But I will say with confidence that it is premature to call it for Obama. The Clintons fight hard, they fight dirty, and they’re used to winning.

— John Hood is chairman and president of the John Locke Foundation.