NORFOLK, Va. – The candidate who talked a lot of schoolyard smack got smacked down.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., won the North Carolina primary big Tuesday, by a double-digit margin. He kicked U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. in the rear end of her pantsuit.

Impolite you say? Probably not considering Clinton’s tough-gal bravado for more than a week:

• That she wanted to debate her competitor one-on-one with no moderator [“Fight Club”-style?],
• Or that unlike her rival, she would "obliterate Iran" while Obama might serve tea [oh snap, she played the girly man card],
• Or her dig that Obama was an elitist for calling her summer gas tax holiday scheme a gimmick that wouldn’t relive hurting consumers in the short term.

Clinton pounded Obama like a boxer who knew her opponent was bleeding and cowering against the ropes.

Obama was pretty nicked up from the roughing up he took a week ago from Jeremiah Wright, then the follow-up beating from media pundits.

Yes, Obama was tagged a number of times, but not knocked out.

He did not panic. He punched back and regained his footing in of all places, North Carolina, the state where nearly 20 years ago U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. used crude race-mongering tactics to beat back Harvey Gantt, mayor of Charlotte, and an attractive black son of the new South.

Apparently with Tuesday’s win, nothing can be finer than to be in Carolina for Obama.

[I couldn’t help myself. I’m writing at the foot of an airport gate – 30 miles from the N.C. state line – and an “Andy Griffith” show rerun is playing on the monitor. Golly.]

Now, Obama was looking confident again at the rallies, and it was Clinton who was looking battered.

She put up a brave face after the Indiana results came in. Clinton won, but not by much,  51 to 49 percent. She needed win decisively in the Hoosier state in order to cast more doubt about Obama’s electability.

Clinton had the ingredients to do damage: Indiana has lots of white blue-collar and rural voters, constituencies that served her well in big wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Black voters who have really warmed to Obama are concentrated in two places, Indianapolis and Gary. The latter city and region had the potential to be very problematic. Gary is in Lake County, a horrifically segregated neighbor south of Chicago, Obama’s home base. Gary was the black, economically depressed doughnut hole surrounded by white enclaves Hammond, Muenster, Merrillville and Crown Point. Those are communities I remember covering as a journalist there in the late ‘90s.

Today, the blacks trapped in Gary are still depressed; the whites in the other communities are smarting because industrial boom times are behind them and the recent gas spikes are painful. These voters could have swallowed Clinton’s crass pandering about gas holidays and dismissed Obama because of his link to the motormouth pastor.

But it looks like a lot of white folk did not run from Obama on Tuesday.    

Obama made a net gain in delegates again, but not enough to clinch the nomination.

Meanwhile, Clinton is mathematically eliminated – delegate-wise – from qualifying for the nomination. She’s not done however. It looks like the campaign will be settled after at least a few June primaries.