he's not winning, Hillary would be if they weren't cheating her out of votes in several states

Yeah, but how does that work? He has more delegates, does anything else matter?

^ Short answer: no.

Long answer is that Hillary's trying to make the case that since no one will be able to reach an absolute majority of delegates with the kind you get by people voting, that the superdelegates will decide the nominee. Since superdelegates can vote for whoever they want, based on any criteria they want, all she needs to do is put together a convincing argument for them.

The arguments she's made are long and ridiculous now. Most of it hinges on Michigan and Florida, who'd been stripped of all their delegates for moving their primaries up before Feb 5th. Those states held their primaries, but no one campaigned in either state, and Obama & Edwards weren't on the ballot in Michigan. Hillary won both states by a wide margin, and insists those results stand, and be counted in their full strength. That won't happen, since it'd erase the penalty for those states, but we'll know more about those after the rules meeting on May 31st. Even if you added the delegates (or popular vote) that way, Obama still has the lead in pledged delegates, though it shrinks considerably.

She also makes electibility arguments about big states and swing states, and most recently about Obama's "problems with working class whites", with a lot of subtle and not so subtle tones of "white people won't vote for him".

She's earned a lot of ire for all of the above, though lately she seems to be coming to grips with the facts that she won't win, no matter what she says or does. Her only hope is that something totally destructive happens to Obama before the convention.

If "Presumptive Nominee" didn't have a strict definition of "the candidate who's mathematically locked up the nomination through absolute majority of delegates", we'd all be calling Obama the Presumptive Nominee, because he's 99% likely to be the nominee now.

The media is now pretty clear in saying: it's over.

Thanks for that, you guys have the strangest ratio of politician brains to complicated political system.

West Virginia isn't a very big state, so losing it by such a large margin wasn't much of an issue. And it's pretty much entirely made up of the sort of people that wouldn't vote for Obama, so, not exactly a big surprise, either.

BillO is referring to the fact that Clinton "won" Florida and Michigan, because the other Democrats did not campaign in those states, and Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan. And this was because the states broke the rules by having their primaries too early in the election, and so their delegates were taken away from them.

Anyway, so, Clinton 'won' those states. And so lately, since the only way for her to possibly get the nomination now is for those votes to count, that's what everyone is harping on.

i predict a military coup by clinton/mccain in the case that someone else gets on the ticket.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Fixed your link to Nytimes (missing a quote)

I was? Thanks Dag.

Barack is a transparent tool-revisionist history at its finest when he opens his cake-hole, he only wished he was a black man, he reads like a wiki contribution.... Machavellian in scope, he is a dangerous, ill-equipped head of a hydra bigger than you can imagine, and part of the death of the sovereignty established with the blood of many, for America-Fuck, them all, especially Obama-too speak of the mechanics of his entry into the highest office, is like concentration camp patrons commenting on which sores or legions are most tolerable while working in full sun....

downvoting comments is fun.

Obama/McCain '08! Now thats a winning ticket!

Honestly Hillary is just running this campaign now for 2012. I think she's beating it into the ground so she can run Obama down into a craphole. She's a bitch, simple as that.