Following Obama’s landslide wins in Maryland, DC and Virginia yesterday, all networks finally agree (despite the bizarre math and estimating needed to come up with the figures) that Barack now leads Clinton in both pledged delegates and Super Delegates.

Clinton’s Super Delegate loyalty is built on “shaky ground” according to the AP’s Ron Fournier. He writes:

Obama has won 23 of 35 contests, earning the majority of delegates awarded on the basis of election results. The remaining 796 delegates are elected officials and party leaders whose votes are not tied to state primaries or caucuses; thus, they are dubbed “superdelegates.”

And they are not all super fans of the Clintons.

Clinton loses two more staffers. TPM reports “Hillary Bloodletting Continues: Two More Staffers Out”

The troubled and desperate Hillary Clinton campaign wants more debates and has started running this negative ad in Wisconsin. Some thoughts about the ad…

• It’s well-designed and emotionally pretty effective
• It minimizes her appearance in it - always a good thing
• Hillary says Obama doesn’t want to debate her - not mentioning the other debates he accepted in the coming months. The losing candidate always wants more debates. They have more to gain from them. Clinton hopes the debate talk stops the media from talking about the huge winning streak Obama is having and all the bad news coming from her campaign.
• The poorer, cash-strapped candidate always wants more debates as they’re free media. Clinton’s machine is expensive and their donor base isn’t delivering any amount close to what Obama’s grassroots campaign is generating.
• The ad talks about her universal health care plan - again glossing over the unenforceable nature of it. The only way to mandate health insurance is to further punish the uninsured. There’s no other way around it.
• To date, Obama has not run a single negative TV ad.

I still don’t see the Clinton campaign giving up until the very end. IMO, their inability to ever concede error (all the staffers they’ve just replaced were doing amazing jobs, according to the campaign) or defeat (not even a mention of Maryland, DC and Virginia - where they campaigned hard - in last night’s speech) is not an affectation, it’s genuine egomania and delusion.

Socksandbarney.com has obtained this exclusive video of a recent staff meeting at Clinton HQ…

– Steve

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.