The race between Clinton and Barack Obama now drags on to Indiana and North Carolina on May 6 — yet another “Super Tuesday” of voting in the epic contest to decide the party’s standard-bearer for the November election.

North Carolina is heavy with African-American voters, who have flocked to the mixed-race Obama. But Indiana is another rust-belt industrial state in the depressed mold of Pennsylvania and Ohio, which Clinton also won.

In the meantime, Republican John McCain has the luxury of time on his hands as he sells his heroic life story to voters, and hammers his prime themes of national security and the “war on terror.”

Republican National Committee deputy chairman Frank Donatelli told MSNBC the Democratic slugfest was “fun to watch,” and that his party was seizing the initiative by organizing intensively for November.

Clinton’s diehard supporters once again sustained her presidential dream in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary. Not for the first time, Obama failed to pry enough women and blue-collar voters away from the former first lady’s camp.

The Illinois senator was on the defensive for days after describing small-town Americans as “bitter” people who cling to guns and religion out of economic frustration.

“But I suspect the results reflect organizational realities on the ground,” said Richard Johnston, research director of the National Annenberg Election Study at the University of Pennsylvania.

“He was up against the state Democratic party, and the Philadelphia Democratic party,” he said, after much of Pennsylvania’s party establishment backed Clinton to blunt Obama’s massive superiority in fundraising.

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