After the confetti is swept and the champagne bottles are tossed a more sober reality will take hold. Not just that her net gain of delegates this week will be, at most, in the single digits. But worse. There is no plausible scenario in which Clinton can win the nomination. At least not democratically.
That’s from Marc Cooper’s assessment of HillaryClinton’s wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island last night. Writing in the Huffington Post, Cooper succinctly concludes she can not be the Democrats’ nominee because she has fewer delegates than Obama and will continue to, unless she wins all future contests by at least a 20% margin and persuades enough superdelegates go her way.
That opinion is taken one step further by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. Alter has been clicking away at Slate’s Delegate Calculator. He says even if the DNC allows do-overs of those naughty primaries in Florida and Michigan and even if she wins big, she would not be likely to capture enough delegates to win the nomination.
Not democratically.
In The New York Times, Patrick Healy sums it up: “She needs to use Tuesday night to persuade superdelegates — the hundreds of party leaders who have a vote on the nomination — to stop abandoning her. Or, at least, stop long enough for Mrs. Clinton to damage him [Obama] with a line of attack, goad him into a colossal gaffe (or watch him make one on his own) or rely on the media to unearth a campaign-altering scandal about him.”
And she needs to tidy up her own house, aptly described in today’s Washington Post as a “campaign mired in debt and riven by dissension.”
The Post quotes Democratic strategist Jim Jordan, who iniitally ran John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. “Her durability is impressive if not astonishing, but she is still looking at some pretty cold, hard numbers in the race. She’s running out of time, she’s running out of space.”
He called the liklihood of Hillary getting the nomination, even with her wins in Ohio and Texas, as “impossible, really.”
Wed. update: Now that Texas caucuses have finally been counted and reported, it appears Hillary’s net gain for delegates yesterday was 8.
5 comments
March 5, 2008 at 7:32 am
From Scratch » Blog Archive » About last night
[...] Anyone interested in my take on last night’s primary results can find it at Barry!, a new political blog of mine. It’s called Reality Check for Hillary. [...]
March 5, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Will Rhodes
The party pays for a caucus, the state pays for a primary. There will be caucus’ in Florida and Michigan – and Obama will win those.
The reality of it all is that she is not a leader who the US public can look up to – she went negative and that is bad for her. Will Obama do the same – I personally can’t see it.
If he does – then all’s good to me – she needs to be on the back burner for a while and not use GOP tactics.
March 6, 2008 at 1:18 am
ellaella
I just read an entry on First Read, the political blog at MSNBC, in which Obama’s campaign mgr is quoted as saying:
“So we are obviously not going to allow these attacks to go unanswered, and we think things like who has the strongest ethics, who has the chance to really bring about reform, who’s going to be the most open with the American people that that’s a real distinction,” he said.
He added that because the Clinton campaign couldn’t win on pledged delegates, it would try to devise “alternative nomination strategies.” He added that the Obama campaign would fight back and “raise questions on things like disclosure, like ethics, like foreign policy.”
And I’d welcome the latter.
Her chutzpah about MI & FL “should count” is amazing. How can she think she won MI when she was the only candidate on the ballot? Even if Obama lost both he would still have more delegates.
I thought I had Clinton fatigue 8 years ago. I’m really exhausted now. If she’s even the next VICE president it will be too much Hillary for me.
Good to see you here! Thanks!
March 9, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Morris to Hillary: It’s over « Barry!
[...] Related: Reality Check for Hillary [...]
March 19, 2008 at 8:28 am
Hillary’s quest, Hillary’s records | From Scratch
[...] She trails Barack Obama in both popular votes and elected delegates; without do-overs in Florida, where the proposal has been rejected, and in Michigan, where Obama was not on the ballot, she has virtually no chance of catching up. Not democratically. [...]