Some thoughts from a satiated political junkie:

I come away from this long primary season with more respect for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton than I've ever had before. While she ultimately fell short, she proved that she has the toughness and the resilience of a real political leader.

The calls for her to drop out of the race, which started in February, were unseemly and shortsighted. That Clinton became a better candidate as the race progressed, that she found a voice and a larger constituency the longer she stayed in — and won important states while that was happening — only justify her decision to run the whole course.

And the same goes for her decision not to concede Tuesday evening. Politics is about power. There are 18 million people who voted for our New York senator across the country. She has a bargaining chip, and she should use it.

The trick will be to use that power constructively and with some degree of finesse. If Clinton looks as if she is out to hurt Sen. Barack Obama or pressure him into putting her on the ticket, she harms not only the party's chances in November, but herself. This all has a few days, if not a few weeks, to play out. She must give the impression of doing all she can to help the party in November first, and then worry about her future political career.

Even as my admiration for Hillary Clinton increased as the campaign continued, so did my alarm at the behavior of former President Bill Clinton. His narcissistic performance throughout the primaries hurt rather than helped his wife, and it will no doubt be a major factor in whether Obama believes running with Hillary will actually benefit his campaign. The questions — about his ties with fat-cat donors, his library and overseas speaking arrangements — would not be overlooked by the Republicans.

There's always a tendency to look back on losing campaigns and conclude that a, b and c were mistakes that brought them down. And the winners are usually deemed political geniuses. It's not that simple.

First, give Obama credit for being a dynamic candidate who reached out to new voters and captured the desire for change. But what will always puzzle me is why a political team as experienced as the Clintons' did not pursue voters in the smaller caucus states, where Obama won so many of his delegates. No matter what the candidates say publicly, the name of the game is gathering delegates. The inattention to the caucus states will go down as a decisive strategic blunder by the Clinton campaign.

Obama's victory is of historical significance given our nation's racial history, but his task — to win 270 electoral votes — is daunting. Primary results have only a limited relationship to the general election.

Yes, there will be a clear difference in philosophy between the candidates. But the key for Obama, I believe, will be to convince voters that he has the experience to be president at a difficult time.

It's the same bar that Ronald Reagan had to get over in the 1980 campaign. Until the very end it looked like a close contest against President Jimmy Carter — even though everything had been going wrong for Carter. But at some point in the fall, worries that Reagan was a conservative extremist in the mold of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican candidate, were overcome. He had passed the presidential test. And, to be fair, Carter had failed it.

Obama slipped in the opinion polls as the primary season progressed. But he is a better candidate for having been challenged in the first half of the year by Clinton. It's still five months before Election Day, and there's plenty of time for stuff to happen. The underlying factors are on Obama's side: the economy and the war in Iraq. But the question to be answered is whether he gets over the "he's ready to be president" bar.

James Klurfeld is a professor of journalism at Stony Brook University. His e-mail address is james.klurfeld@stonybrook.edu. He wrote this commentary for Newsday.