Obama will be in Iowa this evening and is expected to speak after the Oregon results come in. I was worried when I first heard about this is it seemed to be the makings of a victory or coronation event. One local Obama supporter sent me an invite to an Obama “coronation” party tonight and cringed when I saw that word. The only coronations in America should occur AFTER the swimsuit and evening gown portions of the competition.

My fears were set aside when I read in the New York Times that Obama has sent the word out that this will not be a victory party but a celebration of having secured the majority of the pledged delegates awarded in primaries in caucuses. Once the results from Oregon come in, if Democrats nominate Clinton they will be reversing the decision of the majority of states and delegates.

I think it’s wise for Obama to commemorate this occasion in a big way. Superdelegates have been streaming toward Obama and this will probably open the floodgates.

But Hillary Clinton is still in this. Her team is still trying to find a solid metric which somehow proves this is a split decision to allow the supedelegates to select her at the convention over Obama.

That metric is now the popular vote. Obama leads the popular vote unless you cut the numbers the following way…

IF you count the votes cast in the disqualified non-contests of Florida and Michigan AND IF you don’t grant Obama any of the protest votes for “uncommitted” in Michigan where only Clinton had her name on the ballot AND IF you don’t count the estimated votes from the four caucus states where vote totals have not yet been released… THEN Clinton has a 26,000 vote lead. That’s about a third of the number of people who showed up an Obama rally in Oregon yesterday.

Basically - if you count the popular votes in Michigan and Florida and the stimates for those four caucuses then the popular vote totals are very close but Obama still wins. The main change will come with Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has a very active electorate and over a million votes may be cast. Hillary is expected to win there by a sizable margin. That would give her, when these final contests are counted (and if Florida and Michigan are counted) a popular vote lead.

If that happens, if Team Clinton can argue that an Obama nomination goes against the popular vote - like Bush’s did over Gore - and that Obama’s nomination is somehow a gaming of the system, then she can justify her continued fight on to the convention.

Obama’s move tonight seems to be to seal the deal and to end this before Team Clinton can pull that together.

In an ideal situation for Obama, he would be joined on stage tonight by 70 as-of-yet undeclared super delegates including Al Gore to end this.

We’ll see what happens.

– Steve

Stumble it!

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