Opinion: Hillary Clinton wins West Virginia ... but will anyone care?

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As expected, Hillary Clinton was instantly declared the winner of the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary by every media outlet in the business of making such calls.

Now, the question becomes how bad of a thumping Barack Obama endured and whether it will make a whit of difference to the presumption among so many party leaders -- and pundits -- that the Illinois senator remains on the path to his party’s nomination.

With so few pledged delegates at stake in the Mountain State -- 28 -- even the early projections of a 2-to-1 Clinton victory would only barely chip away at Obama’s overall lead in this category. What the political world will be watching, though, is whether the steady -- though hardly torrential -- stream of superdelegates into the Obama camp over the past week dries up for the moment.

-- Don Frederick