Sitting here in the ashes of Pennsylvania, we’ve got to wonder what’s going on in the popular mind. Clinton’s ten-point win is, while not as big as the polls indicated a bare two weeks ago, better than many had expected. Tracking polls had shown Obama gaining, the margin falling to as little as five percent.

It’s probably fitting, even if nerve-wracking, for Obama to be weakened, at least temporarily, by the scattershot assaults of the Clinton campaign and the emergence in the mass media of idiotic non-issues. It puts him face-to-face with his own character and his own message.

Tonight there is a serious argument taking place among Obama’s closest advisers. One side is telling him that he needs to strike back, that he needs to now go after Clinton with the ferocity – if not the dishonesty – with which she has been relentlessly going after him. If he does not do this, they say, he risks losing the race. He will appear to be weak, unable to “stand up” to her. He will “fail” the “Commander-in-Chief test” that the New York Senator managed to snow the media with. He will thereby risk losing in Indiana in two weeks, and this in turn will scare the super delegates into fearing that he would be “unelectable” in November.

The other side is telling him something quite different. Their point is that the foundation of his candidacy is his authenticity. He is not, simply put, an asshole or a liar. His strength is not something ‘proven’ by yelling or issuing nasty remarks. His toughness is of character. If he sacrifices that which motivates him, which defines him , then not only would he do damage to his own true self but to the inspired foundation of his campaign.

I don’t know which argument will prevail, but I suspect that he will choose the latter course.

It is not only hard to remain impassive in the face of the viciousness of the Clinton campaign, it is hard to get some people to understand that real strength, real toughness, is often embodied in the ability to remain faithful to principle despite provocation. Maybe we ought, as a nation, to recall Martin Luther King, Jr., who led with courage, intellect, and a gentleness of spirit.

King did not find it necessary to strike back, with fists or even, sometimes, with words. His strategy was to elevate the dialogue, to educate, to win over. He trusted that his message would resonate in enough hearts to change the moral direction of the nation. He was murdered only because he was succeeding.

There were quite a few times during the King era when his faith was tested. History has shown that he was brave, that he was resolute, and that he was right.

I don’t know who Hillary Clinton might have been once upon a time. She’s someone of strong will and an active mind. It’s said that she once really cared to change America for the better. But a reading of her connections in more recent years to some of the most despicable corporate thugs on the planet, as well as an honest review of her nastier campaign tactics, makes it clear that something happened to her along the way.

We’ve seen this before, what becomes of someone whose dreams of personal success overwhelm what might’ve been the best in them. It destroyed Hubert Humphrey (and the Democratic Party) in 1968 and 1972. It is destroying Clinton now.

There is no scenario in which Clinton can win the nomination without simultaneously ensuring that McCain will defeat her. She can only win the nomination in the ruins of the party. She knows this, yet she goes on.

Pennsylvania voters had a chance to make a difference. They did not do so. Now, it is down to Indiana, and to the outcome of the argument inside Obama’s campaign.

Forty years ago, Indiana was the proving grounds for the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy. Having entered the race against an incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, and an anti-war challenger, Eugene McCarthy, he had an uphill fight on his hands. The media in the state was openly hostile. The party apparatus was working for Johnson’s stand-in, popular Governor Roger Branigan.

There were serious doubts whether Kennedy could win the primary, but a failure to do so would have probably damaged his candidacy beyond recovery. There were not many primaries in those days. The bosses – 1968’s version of the ‘super delegates’ – were beholden to Johnson, suspicious of RFK, and nonetheless necessary to any mathematical model the Kennedy people designed.

The bosses were not going to back Kennedy unless forced to do so. His strategy was designed to force them to. And in order to do this, he had to show that his support extended well beyond the overwhelming majorities he could count on from black voters. He had to win the votes of ethnic, working-class whites, some of whom had four years earlier supported George Wallace.

He campaigned from an open car, from the back of a train, always in crowds. On the last day before Indiana voted, on Monday, May 6, he started with speeches in Evansville, Ft. Wayne, South Bend, and La Porte. Then began the most remarkable motorcade in American political history.

For nine hours, he stood in the back of a convertible, flanked by Richard Hatcher, black Mayor of Gary, and Tony Zale, white former middleweight boxing champion, and braced by a kneeling Bill Barry, through LaPorte, Porter, and Lake Counties, no telling where one town ended and another began, suburbs, cities, commercial and industrial zones, more towns and cities, rural and urban, black areas, white areas, back to black areas and back again, all the hand-lettered signs thanking him, imploring him to win, and the cheering never stopped.

By nightfall, Barry’s knees were bleeding and Kennedy’s hands cut, bruised and swollen, and still the roads were lined with people, tens of thousands of hopeful faces, kids running alongside, families sitting on the tops of their cars, children bundled against the chill, and they continued into the dark. The last speech, at Whiting, ten at night and five hours late, was bedlam, and then the crowds still massed along the road all the way to the airport.

That motorcade established the electoral bridge between blacks and working-class whites which would certainly, had he lived, have elected Kennedy to the presidency. It reached that place inside the public which any great insurgency must reach. It reached people’s hearts.

That’s where Obama must continue to campaign. He must gamble, as King did, as Kennedy did, that America is ready to choose hope over fear. He must continue to appeal to that which is best in us, believing that only then can the nation be changed and that only then will he be the one we have been waiting for.

If he does that, he can go all the way.