Opinion: As Pennsylvania yields the spotlight, how badly will it want it back?

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Thanks to a Hillary Clinton ‘bio’ ad shown endlessly on local television screens, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians now know Scranton less as a town whose best days were in the 19th century and more as the site of her bucolic childhood summer vacations. (We wonder if tourism will increase there this July and August?)

Meanwhile, in Johnstown, Pa., what must be a perennial preoccupation -- how to fill up spare time during the weekend -- was easily answered this Sunday: Attend a Clinton rally!

Across the state in Philadelphia, chances are that many of those among the more than 35,000 people who thronged into downtown Friday night to hear Barack Obama speak -- and then joined in an impromptu parade through city streets -- will be talking about the communal occasion for months to come.

And it’s likely to be years before the denizens of such * burgs as Moon Township, Lock Haven, Clearfield and Connellsville forget what they now have in common: destinations on the itinerary of a certain former president willing to go the extra mile (or two, or 10, or 100) to help his wife win the Pennsylvania primary.

In material terms, it doesn’t get much better than to have been a TV ad executive over the last month and a half or so in the Keystone State. Not much call for long hours the rest of the year --- not with Obama reportedly spending more than $9 million to make his case on the airwaves, and Clinton close to $4 million.

Our point is this:

After the intoxicating and enriching (literally) experience that Pennsylvania has just gone through, after its citizens have found that what’s on their minds is of vital importance (at least until the polls close at 8 EDT tonight) to a couple of folks vying for the most powerful office in the world, how can the state ever content itself with a sideline role in future presidential campaigns?

Same with Texas and Ohio, which went through a more compressed, but no less frenzied, courtship with the candidates not so long ago. And won’t North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota -- locales of looming battles in the Democratic marathon -- share this feeling?

How the end game plays out between Obama and Clinton remains shrouded in doubt (for snippets from their last full day on the trail in Pennsylvania, see below). But beyond that, after the excitement stirred in state after state by their battle, how on Earth are Democratic and Republican leaders going to rejigger the nominating system to take into account the sense of empowerment that so many voters have tasted this time around -- and probably will want to replicate?

Just asking, as we await the next turn in this now-epic primary season.

-- Don Frederick

* We stand corrected on this phrase, thanks to reader comments. We appreciate the help.