Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton greet each other Wednesday night at the Democratic presidential debate.

AP / Matt Rourke

If I were a Democratic partisan with my heart set on the party’s winning the White House this year, right about now I’d cry.

True, it’s always darkest before the dawn and all that. And, as Pennsylvania Democrats prepare to vote on Tuesday, Tad Devine, a Rhode Islander-turned-fancy-Washington-Democratic consultant, says you can’t even begin to get a fix on the November election until the Democratic race is settled.

Devine, not aligned with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, says John McCain is the strongest candidate the Republicans could choose. But even so, “The hand that he has been dealt for this election is the losing hand.”

You know: Iraq, the economy.

I don’t dispute that. And so far each Democrat runs neck and neck with McCain in trial heats. But it’s also true that, at the moment, the Democratic contest has gone seriously off course.

In last Wednesday’s ABC Obama-Clinton debate from Philadelphia, both candidates failed to distinguish themselves or to do themselves any favors. Parrying tough questions from Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos — Obama bore the brunt of the them — they sought to smooth over missteps and controversies — including bitterness/elitism, Obama’s former pastor and Clinton’s misportrayal of an airport arrival in Bosnia — that have dominated the news for weeks and that could give McCain plenty of ammunition for the fall. That is, they sought to smooth over their own missteps while needling the other guy. That was a strategy employed especially by Clinton. She said Obama could win in November, but she also portrayed him as a flawed lamb the Republicans could slaughter.

She declared, “They’re going to be out there, full force. And you know, I’ve been in this arena for a long time. I have a lot of baggage, and everybody has rummaged through it for years.”

She said she can withstand whatever the GOP sends up.

Yet, in the polls, she is viewed much less favorably than Obama and as less honest and trustworthy. Every time she attacked him during the debate, or raised questions about his electability, it reinforced her stridency. Does it really profit a person with high negatives to be so negative?

Obama insisted he wanted to rise above politics as usual.

Yes, he said, he mangled his message when he spoke of the bitterness of small-town Pennsylvanians, but he said Clinton was beating the comment to death. He said she should know better, that issues like helping people pay their bills were more important, and then he delivered his best — and most devilish — line of the night:

“I recall when back in 1992, when she made a statement about how, what do you expect, should I be at home baking cookies?

“And people attacked her for being elitist and this and that. And I remember watching that on TV and saying, well, that’s not who she is; that’s not what she believes; that’s not what she meant. And I’m sure that’s how she felt as well.

“But the problem is that that’s the kind of politics that we’ve become accustomed to…”

Well, yes, and sometimes it’s because one party is reaching desperately to find something to smear the other party, to mask some weakness of its own.

But often too it happens in primaries, where there is little substantive difference between candidates, and so they or their supporters or the media zero in on other matters, like Clinton’s assertions that she had to dodge sniper fire when landing in Bosnia as first lady or Obama’s sometimes convoluted explanations of why he didn’t move sooner to denounce incendiary comments by his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or why he didn’t leave that congregation.

When Obama talks about Mr. Wright, he makes some sense — for instance, the preacher has done many good things, or the candidate knew some troubling things but hadn’t heard of others. Yet overall, it also leaves you scratching your head, and you think maybe Clinton is onto something when she says you can’t choose your family but you can choose your pastor, and she would have left that particular church.

Still, the Bosnia saga continues to plague Clinton, and she must have left voters more puzzled than ever when, after noting at the debate that she’d written about the incident in her autobiography, she said, “On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And, you know, I’m embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I’ve said it was a mistake.”

But what exactly was the mistake? Was it a deliberate exaggeration? If not, why apologize?

Speaking of which, it’s sad that Obama feels he has to keep expressing remorse for his comments about small-town Pennsylvanians who find themselves in economic straits after broken promises by legions of politicians. (“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”)

I happen to think the comments were spot on, albeit politically awkward.

Clinton certainly did her best to exploit them. In my view E.J. Dionne Jr. had it exactly right when he wrote in Tuesday’s Washington Post that it was understandable that Clinton would pounce. “But something doesn’t parse when a Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate whose family made $109 million since 2001 relentlessly assails a former community organizer on the grounds that he is an elitist. (McCain enthusiastically dittoed the charge Monday.)”

Incidentally, I reread last week the March 18 speech Obama gave on black/white relations at the height of the controversy over the Reverend Wright. In some ways, a passage in it foreshadowed the remarks about Pennsylvanians.

Speaking of the racism and humiliation endured by African-Americans of Mr. Wright’s generation, he said the “anger and bitterness” of those years have not disappeared, and there is still anger in the black community. He said that a similar anger exists in some segments of the white community.

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. … In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”

I think Obama does the nation a favor when he constructively discusses resentments, whether black, white, big city or small town.

But it’s also true that sometimes he expresses himself better than at other times, and sometimes he leaves himself at the mercy of his political opponents.

Meanwhile, do you suppose it’s possible that the Democrats could squander one of their biggest single assets, voter disgust with the war in Iraq?

I thought Clinton, as a student of government, made a good point Wednesday when asked if she would withdraw troops from Iraq even if military commanders said it would destabilize things and set back gains that had been made.

Yes, she said. “Thankfully, we have a system in our country of civilian control of the military.”

Obama echoed: “The commander in chief sets the mission.”

But I will be curious to see how this plays out — in Iraq and in the fall campaign against McCain. The Arizonan may be burdened by his support for the war, but he also might be able to make the Democratic nominee — insisting on moving to withdraw troops no matter what the conditions on the ground — sound inexperienced and irresponsible.

Pennsylvania’s Tuesday primary may quite possibly usher in the end game of the Democratic contest. Clinton has been running ahead of Obama there, but not nearly by as much as early polls showed, and the thinking is she needs a big win to position herself for success in North Carolina and Indiana, two states in which Obama has been leading. Obama remains ahead in delegates and is well ahead in national Democratic polls. And day by day, it appears, he has been able to pick off more so-called super delegates, and it seems likelier and likelier he will be the nominee.

But he certainly seems to have lost some luster in recent weeks as he has come under closer scrutiny and battled adversity.

It’s hardly a surprise that substantial numbers of Obama and Clinton supporters say that if their candidate fails they’ll vote for McCain in November.

But consultant Tad Devine thinks that dynamic may change when the choice — McCain versus Obama, or McCain versus Clinton — finally emerges and McCain comes into clearer focus.

For example, Devine says, many Democrats disappointed at their nominee will stick by the party when they realize that McCain opposes abortion rights.

McCain has a terrific personal story, an appeal to moderates, and a gravitas — and a sense of humor — that can be impressive.

But Devine says he is vulnerable on issues like Iraq, the economy and Bush tax policies. “What we’ve got to do is make sure people don’t get distracted.”

Distracted, he says, by such issues as the storm over Obama and elitism or Clinton and baggage from the 1990s, the idea that the Clinton administration didn’t level with people, something the current sniper fire flap brings to mind.

One other thing: In the aftermath of Wednesday’s debate, ABC took serious heat for the fact that so many of the questions were of the gotcha variety, focusing on candidate gaffes and less on the so-called real issues.

It’s a bum rap, especially because this was the first debate in weeks and thus the first opportunity to confront the two candidates together and try to sort through the static that had been filling the air.

It’s easy to say: You should have asked this or you should have asked that. But that doesn’t mean you can make candidates actually answer the questions or say something new. For example, when ABC asked about gun control, each candidate danced.

Reporters work with what the candidates’ fate deals them. If over a period of weeks those candidates say dumb things or controversial things that raise doubts about their character or wisdom or electability, I think it’s worth trying to pin them down and seeing how they react under pressure.

That is a valuable public service, and if the Democratic candidates can’t impress people under those circumstances, too bad for them.

M .Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com