Math and Myths

If the nominating process was like a college basketball conference tournament, a team could go on a winning streak at the end of the season, get hot, and even though they don't have enough wins to win the conference, with a little luck and hard work, they could win the tournament. Georgia did that recently -- they didn't have a winning record in the conference, but got hot in the tournament and made it into the Big Dance.

The nominating process isn't however like that. Hillary Clinton may be getting hot and there may be some buyers remorse among some white Obama supporters due to the Wright affair, but the math says that it's almost impossible for Clinton overcome Obama's lead in delegates. She would have to take every contest from here on out by sizable margins. She may indeed win Pennsylvania and a few other states, but can she win enough by enough of a margin? No. Even here advisers privately concede as much. At the end of the day, Obama will be ahead in states won and delegates won. Her only hope is for the Super Delegates to overturn that lead and hand it off to her. Now that's possible, but extremely unlikely. To do so would be for the party to say to the African-American community that they don't count. I don't think they'll do that.

So why continue? Good question. Why are we continually told that things are closer than they really are by the media, perhaps this is a myth that dies hard. The Clinton's do have a history of pulling upsets, but is that going to happen this time. The only way is for Obama to say or do something so incredibly stupid or that something that disqualifies him in the eyes of everyone across the board. Will that happen? I don't think that's likely.

And that's why Bill Richardson finally broke to Obama. He knows it's time to do the math and put aside the myth. It's time for the party to come together behind the candidate who has the nomination well in hand, get ready for a sane convention, and spend money on the November campaign rather than on bloodying the eventual winner. Is the Clinton campaign ready for this? It doesn't seem so. But I think you'll begin to see major players in the Super Delegate pool start to make their voices heard. The player that has yet to be heard from is Al Gore.

Comments

roy said…
why indeed does she continue to fight? and what can she possibly hope to accomplish by this? I don't understand. All she is accomplishing is giving McCain a serious bump in his numbers and providing lots of ammunition for the general election.
Robert Cornwall said…
I think she believes that the party will see Obama's negatives as so great that they will overturn the earlier votes. The danger in this is that it will appear to be a racial move and could and likely will alienated the Black community, which will see itself -- rightly -- as a voting block taken for granted by the party. Unless she knows something we don't know that will disqualify Obama, she only damages the party's chances in Novemember. And if she knows something taht we don't know, then she needs to tell Howard Dean!

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