Last week in my blog we asked, “What has happened to Obama? He has lost his luster with some voters.”

Well, this week he got it back in North Carolina and to a great extent in Indiana. Richard Nordan, a white North Carolina voter told ABC News, “This country needs youthful idealism and Sen. Obama has brought that out and I appreciate that.”

And even though the TV pundits and the op-ed columnists have declared Obama the winner, Clinton says she’s going to keep going—to West Virginia, next Tuesday, which she is expected to win, to Kentucky on May 20, which she is also expected to win, and to Puerto Rico on June 1, which also favors her. If this thing continues, Obama is expected to win Oregon, Montana and South Dakota. And the Superdelegates continue to peel off in his direction. The math and the momentum are with him.

But Clinton tells USA Today, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on, citing an AP article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states[North Carolina and Indiana] who had not completed college had supported me. There’s a pattern emerging here.”

Peggy Noonan, who used to write speeches for Republican Presidents, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical, ‘the black guy can’t win but the white girl can’ –is, well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.”

Although Obama did better with whites in North Carolina, Indiana and elsewhere than Clinton is willing to acknowledge, the fact remains that there is a division in the Democratic party. Young people, African American voters, better educated, more affluent 
Democrats love Obama. Less educated, less affluent, older voters have expressed a preference for Clinton.

As Inside Washington panelist Mark Shields says, it is Obama’s great challenge now to find a way to bridge that gap. And how will John McCain run against him? We had some indication of that this week as McCain criticized Obama for voting against the Supreme Court nominations of conservatives Roberts and Alito.

McCain also said Hamas is “endorsing Senator Obama,” based on comments Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas’s top political adviser in Gaza, made on New York City’s WABC radio last month, namely that Hamas likes Obama and hopes he’ll win.

Inside Washington panelist Charles Krauthammer says McCain will run against Obama on three issues—his inexperience, the “elitist” label, and his liberal voting record in the Senate. McCain must to try to take the focus off the Republicans’ terrible approval numbers, the hangover from an unpopular President, a floundering economy and—a major challenge—an unpopular war, while he supports.

Inside Washington panelist Evan Thomas of Newsweek fears that it will get ugly. Very ugly.