Well, that all changed with the second Wright flare-up.  After that, Obama's national numbers tanked, his numbers in IN and NC tanked, and Clinton seemed to be more confident than ever that she was on to something.  Essentially, Wright changed the narrative so drastically that IN looked out of reach for Obama and NC looked as if it was going to be substantially closer than the 20 points Obama supporters were originally hoping for.

And then, after all that... after all the garbage thrown at Obama in the last week regarding Wright, with Clinton at the top of her game, the results in the states basically reset to where they were originally.  It's not just the fact that he beat expectations, it's the fact that he still did as well as he did despite Wright.

It's hard to say exactly what would've happened had there not been a second Wright flare up last week.  Perhaps Obama would've pulled out IN and increased his margin in NC if Wright didn't do his press tour. But what seems fairly obvious to me right now is that if we had these same results now without the whole secondary "Wright" episode, with the "split" that talking heads were sure would cause the campaign to continue just a couple weeks ago (no matter what the margins looked like), that's basically exactly what would've happened.  The media would've looked at this and said "Looks like they split..." and moved on to the next states.  Heck, even right before the results started coming in, the talking heads on MSNBC were saying that a split would be "boring" and "status quo".  We got a split, and suddenly their eyes opened anyway.

Wright effectively wrapped up the campaign for Obama because the pastor gave Obama his worst week, Clinton her best week, and he still ended up blowing her away in NC and coming damn close to a win in IN (and a probable win without Operation Chaos).  Without this kind of expectation reset, there's no way that Russert would've said it's over, or that Hillary would've been facing calls from her own supporters to stand down now.

Would I have preferred that Wright didn't create an episode last week?  Absolutely.  But, in a truly bizarre and counter-intuitive way, Wright actually helped Obama end the destructive democratic primary.