Posted on 04/24/2008 2:34:07 PM PDT by The_Republican
The good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she’s winning a lot of battles. The bad news is that the war is pretty much lost. Sure, she won Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary by a strong 9 points in the face of being outspent on television ads by Barack Obama 2-to-1. She also won Ohio, Rhode Island, and at least the primary part of the bizarre “Texas two-step” primary-and-caucus combination on March 4. But today, she is 133 delegates behind Obama, 1,728 to 1,595, according to NBC News. At this point last week, she trailed by 136 delegates. Since then Clinton has scored a net gain of 10 delegates in Pennsylvania, according to NBC, but has lost a few more superdelegates, so she has made little headway.
If this contest were still at the point where momentum, symbolism, and reading tea leaves mattered, Clinton would be in pretty good shape. Everything she has needed to happen is happening now. Obama is getting tougher press coverage and critical examination. He’s also getting rattled a bit, and he didn’t perform well in the recent debate in Philadelphia. Clinton is winning in big, important places, but it’s happening about three months too late.
At the end of the day, the popular vote for the Democratic nomination means nothing. I doubt that having won the popular vote in the 2000 general election is of much solace to Al Gore. Many a football team gains more yards than its opponent in a game yet loses on that important technicality called points.
The Clinton folks shouldn’t be faulted for the arguments they are making: In the big states that will determine the final outcome in November, she has done better than Obama, and she holds on to downscale white voters better than her opponent does. Beyond the fact that both assertions are true, I’d make the same arguments if I were in Clinton’s shoes, as would most of Obama’s strategists if they were working for Clinton.
But you can’t change how the game is played once it has begun. The Democrats have decided that the nominee will be determined by the number of delegates won, not by the popular vote, and that primaries held in direct violation of party rules (in this case, Florida’s and Michigan’s) don’t count. End of discussion.
With the Republican National Committee having adopted “the Ohio plan,” an interesting and promising proposal for dealing with the scheduling of presidential primaries and caucuses, and the Democratic National Committee indicating that it will take up the issue as well, party rules will be revisited for 2012. Democrats might want to consider establishing some type of “bonus” delegates for winning a state, or at least modifying the party’s perverse proportional representation system, which, in a two-way race, makes it extremely difficult to build a lead and almost impossible to overtake an opponent who has one. But for this election, the rules are the rules.
The race now moves to Indiana and North Carolina, which vote on May 6. Obama appears to be narrowly ahead in the former and enjoys a 20-point advantage in the latter. If given the choice of Clinton’s momentum or Obama’s money going into two states where he is already ahead, I’d take the money and run.
In some ways, Clinton has spent the past six weeks in a horrible situation. How do you quit a race when you’re still winning primaries? The delegate and fundraising pictures looked dismal to the point of near-impossibility, yet she was still taking the big primaries. There was really no way she could have stood on the podium in Philadelphia on Tuesday night and said, “Thank you, Pennsylvania, for this great victory. Oh, by the way, I’m now dropping out.”
As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.
Copy of my post from another thread. According to RCP Remaining Delegates and my best guesses who wins:
Guam 4 (62%-38% Obama - Obama 3 Klinton 1)
North Carolina 115 (54%-46% Obama - 63 Obama - Klinton 52)
Indiana 72 (50%-48% Klinton - Obama - 35 Klinton - 37)
West Virginia 28 (60%-40% Klinton - Obama 12 Klinton 16)
Oregon 52 (53%-47% Obama - Obama 28 - Klinton 24)
Kentucky 51 (56%-44% Klinton - Obama 23 - Klinton 28)
Puerto Rico 55 (60%-40% Klinton - Obama 22 - Klinton 33)
Montana 16 (54%-46% Obama - Obama 9 - Klinton 7)
South Dakota 15 (54%-46% Obama - Obama 9 Klinton 6)
So out of REMAIING 408 total Pledge Delegates:
Obama - 204
Klinton - 204
Beautiful!
If you believe RCP’s Total Delegate Counts (Super + Pledged) then right now Totals are:
Obama - 1726
Klinton - 1592
With my fuzzy math above the totals become:
Obama - 1930 (95 short of 2,025 needed)
Klinton - 1796 (229 short of 2,025 needed)
REMAINING UNCOMMITTED SUPER DELEGATES - 299
So Hildabeast would need 76.6% of the uncommitted Super Delegates.
People smarter than me already did analysis of un-comitted delegates on RCP and long time ago I posted that, MOST of the un-committed are in OBAMA’S States. Also, which state have Klinton carried 76% of Super Delegates?
ONLY HOPE KLINTON HAS IS TO CONTINUE TO DAMAGE OBAMA AND DEEM HIM UN-ELECTABLE IN HOPES OF GETTING HIS SUPER DELEGATES TO FLIP.
Only other hope she has is either another BITTER-GATE or her Scorch Earth Private Detectives have dug up some more juicy stuff that is going to be released to Sean Hannity at the appropriate time.
Other than that, the she has lost.
Ever seen the eyes of a psychopath? Check out Hillary on this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u1nmGmtD18
FOCUS GROUP AND POLL SAYS OBAMA FAR WORSE THAN HILLARY IN GENERAL:
. . . Also, Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that four focus groups he’s conducted among blue-collar whites in Michigan and Missouri show “they are open to voting for Hillary Clinton, but there’s no way in hell they are going for Obama. It’s cultural.
“They just don’t think he’s a patriotic American. It’s the flag pin, his church, his wife’s statement that most Americans are ‘mean.’ As one woman said in one of these groups, ‘I don’t think he bleeds red, white and blue.’”
Ayres also polled Tennessee — a GOP-leaning state — for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) and found that Clinton would lose to McCain by 8 points, but that Obama would lose by 20 points. Twenty-five percent of Democrats said they would not vote for Obama. . . .
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/obama_is_wounded_but_clinton_m.html
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
People in purgatory are guaranteed getting into heaven once they serve there time.
I thought Sean had the Stop Hilllereee Express? Whatever happened to that?
DO NOT use Hail Mary in the same sentence with that witch hilllereee.
Operation chaos is working - it is handing Hillary a match and some gasoline just daring her to implement her own scorched Earth campaign. There is an(un)civil war in the DNC, Howard Dean is looking for the life raft (he is not the type to go with the ship), AL Gore’s count and re-count until I win strategy is now an albatross around the neck of the party, (every vote counts just some more than others - in fact some votes wont count), John Kerry looks less foolish than either B. Hussen or Hillary - it would be a great day for conservatives except for -— McCain!
The idiocy of Democrat Primaries. Hillary wins PA by nearly 10 points and yet doesn’t even gain 10 delegates.
If we had similar idiotic primaries, Conservatives would havve a chance.
I’d like to see McCaulif and Dean thrown in to a padded room locked from the outside and maybe 10 cameras and audio.
These two woman would fight like little girls.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.