Is it game over? It certainly feels a little more like it watching Sen. Barack Obama address a crowd in Raleigh, N.C., on May 6, the night of the crucial Democratic primaries held in both Indiana and North Carolina.

Here’s Obama’s address to the Raleigh crowd …

Obama won North Carolina comfortably. Hundreds of miles away, vowing to soldier on, Sen. Hillary Clinton addressed supporters after an apparent victory in Indiana. She withstood a late surge to win the Hoosier State.

Both Democratic candidates stuck to their campaigns’ central themes - experience vs. change - and made some subtle overtures to the other, while also looking ahead to future primaries and to beating John McCain.

Follow the jump for both parts of Hillary’s speech …

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Below are excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in Pennsylvania (top) and Barack Obama’s address to supporters in Indiana (bottom). After a contentious Pennsylvania primary, both of the Democratic presidential candidates tried to maintain a positive, uplifting tone throughout. What happens next?

Below is the transcript of Barack Obama’s remarks at the now-infamous San Francisco fundraiser in which he stated that rural voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the Midwest have more difficulty connecting with him.

Here’s the full text of his remarks, from which several lines have been excerpted, played incessantly by the media and over-analyzed. Not Obama’s finest choice of words, but nevertheless, a bit different than we’re led to believe …

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Barack Obama: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government.

The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’ … there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

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American history is defined by those moments that signal a divide between all that went before them and all that followed them.

Never had a candidate for national office spoken so frankly about race in America as Barack Obama did Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Except maybe once.

A hundred and fifty years ago, another lanky Illinois lawyer gave a speech that changed the way Americans talked about racial issues of their day.

Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” address, with which he accepted a U.S. Senate nomination in 1858 (he lost) changed the national conversation on slavery and, two years later, Lincoln was on his way to the White House.

Barack Obama planted one of those rhetorical markers in our landscape on Tuesday with his “More Perfect Union” speech near Independence Hall.

The address was meant to dampen the rising criticism that has attached itself to the senator’s campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, began circulating in the past week.

But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Barack Obama chose to place his response to Jeremiah Wright’s comments in a wider consideration of race in America - and the results were nothing short of groundbreaking.

Barack Obama - like Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago - wrote this historic address himself, completing the final draft Monday night.

He unequivocally repudiated Jeremiah Wright’s extreme rhetoric, but what is truly radical about Barack Obama’s analysis was his implicit demand that all Americans accept the imperfections of each others’ views on race.

Embedded in such acceptance is the seed of that “more perfect union” toward which this country - unquestionably great but imperfect - must strive.

Continue reading in the Los Angeles Times …

Barack Obama said this morning at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa., that he chose to run for president because he believes American can’t solve the challenges of these times unless it solves them as a nation.

Forced to address the issue of race as never before following a storm of criticism around his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Democratic presidential candidate again rejected Wright’s controversial remarks.

The Illinois Democrat explained the roots of Wright’s comments, which were quite racially charged, saying he was not trying to justify the statements, but that they aren’t all that he knows of a man who has been like family to him.

Through it all, Barack Obama emphasized, citing his diverse, only-in-America background, he retains “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people… but it also comes from my own American story.”

Below is the full text of Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech …

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“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty-one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.

Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

Yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.

What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

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We know it’s part of politics, but for Barack Obama to be tagged with the all-talk, no action / empty rhetoric label strikes us as ridiculous. Especially given some of the statements of his chief rival made in her victory speech Tuesday night.

For someone who says they stand for action and not talk, the former First Lady sure offered up some awfully broad, empty and misleading remarks in Ohio.

Below are some choice Hillary Clinton quotes from March 4, followed by a brief translation / rebuttal of each by the Donkey Dish editorial board.

Hillary Clinton: “No candidate in recent history, Democrat or Republican, has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary.”

Donkey Dish: Given the state’s late billing on the primary calendar, can anyone even remember the last time March 4 primaries were even contested?

Hillary Clinton: “If we want a Democratic president, we need a nominee who can win the battleground states, just like Ohio. And that is what we’ve done. We’ve won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Arkansas, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee.”

Donkey Dish: That’s about it. Never mind that two of those didn’t count, or that Obama polls better against John McCain, or that he has won more popular votes nationally, of that he’s taken many more states, including Missouri, Colorado and other “red state” staples he alone might bring into play in November.

Hillary Clinton: “More and more people have joined this campaign, and millions of Americans haven’t spoken yet. In states like Pennsylvania and so many others, people are watching this historic campaign, and they want their turn to help make history. They want their voices to count, and they should. They should be heard.”

Donkey Dish: That is, unless you’re one of the superdelegates. In that case, please don’t listen to the people! Slightly more voters picked Obama, after all.

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Yes we can.

They said this day would never come.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Simple, yet profoundly moving phrases from Barack Obama have captivated untold millions in the historic 2008 race for the White House.

Even the most ardent opponents cannot deny his remarkable penchant for oration, as these magical words seem to come straight from Obama’s soul.

Given the Illinois Senator’s fresh-faced look and relative youth (he’s 46), perhaps it isn’t surprising that his chief speechwriter is … wait for it … 26!

Jon Favreau, 26, is the chief speechwriter for Barack Obama.

Having worked on John Kerry’s presidential bid in 2004, Jon Favreau was hired by Obama in 2005. According to a New York Times piece, he’s become a key campaign component and one of the individuals most trusted by Obama.

Favreau’s mission is to channel the very fabric of Barack Obama — his idealism, beliefs, sentences and phrases - in every speech he writes.

It helps that Barack Obama conjures up memories of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., but still, it’s not an easy task.

Try to imagine “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country…” coming out of the mouth of, say, Ron Paul.

Welcome to the challenge of speechwriting.

Continue reading the New York Times’ feature on Favreau here …