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In this pre-Pennsylvania lull—a relative term—it sometimes feels like we’re just finding new ways to express how royally screwed Hillary Clinton is. Well, like it or not, the minds over at ABC have found yet another way. Their verdict: Clinton needs to win 80 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to secure the nomination.
The math is far from perfect (which they freely admit). It assumes that Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, and that Obama wins Guam, North Carolina, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. In their model, they also put each victory at a 55-to-45 split.
But as an experiment, the numbers are instructive. For one thing, this is a fairly optimistic model for Clinton. Given current polls in Pennsylvania, a 10-point margin would be considered a huge win for her. In other states, it’s likely to be closer as well. In the past, Obama has been able to narrow her lead by logging face time in states that favor Clinton. (See California, Texas, and, to a lesser extent, Ohio.) Certain Obama wins, on the other hand, are likely to be wide. North Carolina could well be a blowout, as many polls put him up 20 points. Even when they factor in Florida and Michigan, Clinton still needs to win 237 of the remaining 300 delegates—or about 80 percent—to get to 2025.
Using Slate’s Delegate Calculator, we tried playing around with different scenarios to see how that number changes. Here’s the most interesting one:
Clinton wins big. Say Clinton wins all the remaining contests by a 10-point margin. (That's impossible, barring revelations that Obama does lines on the campaign bus, but bear with us.) Obama would still be ahead in pledged delegates, 1671 to 1563. Add on their current superdelegate tallies—226 for Obama and 251 for Clinton, according to Politico—and they’d be at 1897 and 1814, respectively. Even then, Clinton would need to win 211 of the still-uncommitted 300 delegates, or about 70 percent.
This is worth restating: Even if Hillary Clinton wins every single one of the remaining contests by 10 points, she still needs to win 70 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates. Given that since Feb. 5, Obama has netted 69 superdelegates and Clinton has lost a net of five, it’s fair to say the pendulum is not swinging her way (although she did get a whopping two superdelegates today).
A caveat: Superdelegates are by definition not pledged. Those who have committed can change their minds. If Clinton wins the remaining contests by big margins, surely some Obama supers would swing her way. But they would still have to grapple with the fact that Obama will have won the pledged delegate count. (A fact that's also likely to swing some Clinton supers over to Obama.)
We’ve known for some time that Clinton is relying on superdelegates to win the nomination. (Obama needs them, too, but he will have the pledged delegate count on his side.) Only now is it becoming clear how overwhelmingly she needs to sway them. There's a point at which even Rocky would cut his losses.
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There's no other way to put it: Hillary Clinton is suffering from the
soft punditry of low expectations. We explained yesterday how Hillary's
chances improve if
she's not actively taking damage, kind of like a first-person shooter.
The corollary is that Barack Obama is like Google: He has to continually outperform expectations
to keep his stockholders onboard. Treading water is not an option. So
when both candidates pick up a superdelegate, the tie goes to Clinton.
Factor in the $2.5 million she picked up from last night's Elton John
concert, and we're giving her two-tenths of a point, bringing her to a 10.2 percent chance of winning the nomination.
Today's news: Obama snagged the endorsement of Wayne Holland, the chair
of the Democratic Party in Utah, while Clinton netted former Pittsburgh
Mayor Sophie Masloff, for a gain of one superdelegate apiece. Elton John's benefit concert for Clinton last night raised $2.5 million for her campaign, and Clinton went on the attack in Pennsylvania,
airing a 60-second radio ad calling out Obama for exaggerating his
refusal to take money from oil companies. The Puerto Rico newspaper El Nuevo Dia reports Clinton up in the polls by 13 percentage points in the territory, giving her some light at the end of the tunnel if she can hang on until June 1.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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After Obama released an ad in Pennsylvania claiming not to take money from oil companies, Clinton unleashed her own ad challenging Obama by name and calling on him to withdraw the original ad. Her beef: No one takes money from oil companies. It’s illegal. Also, she calls out Obama for his vote in favor of the “Bush Cheney energy bill” of 2005. (Listen to it here.)
Clinton seems to be right on this one. FactCheck.org has a thorough analysis, which points out that Obama has taken more than $200,000 from people who work for oil companies and their spouses, plus tens of thousands more from two bundlers who are also oil execs. The energy bill vote is more complicated. While it was designed with Cheney’s guidance, and it did provide tax breaks for energy companies, it also offset those breaks with a tax hike for oil spills.
It’s fascinating to watch the Obama camp try to wriggle its way out of exaggerations like this. David Axelrod said there were no plans to revise the ad, saying, “I think it was accurate the way it was.” Well yes, it’s literally true that Obama takes no money from oil companies—that would be illegal. And yes, he’s within bounds when he says he doesn’t take money from PACs. But as FactCheck.org gamely points out, “We're not sure how a $5,000 contribution from, say, Chevron's PAC would have more influence on a candidate than, for example, the $9,500 Obama has received from Chevron employees giving money individually.”
Back in November, John Edwards accused Clinton of “parsing” the truth. The context was a debate where she appeared to waffle on whether she supported Eliot Spitzer’s proposed drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. A day later, she came out and explicitly opposed it. Now Obama is doing the same thing: Slicing the truth down into tiny pieces, the result of which isn’t false, exactly, but highly misleading. It would be politically embarrassing for Obama to drop the ad at Clinton’s request. But if he expects to hold his opponents to the same standard—say, to challenge Clinton on her absurd claim that she opposed the Iraq war before he did starting in 2005—a clarification would be in order.
It's old news that Obama, by casting himself as the "change" candidate, has set his fans up for disappointment. No presidential candidate can succeed without some truth-twisting, and Obama is no different. But the oil ad isn't a white lie, nor is it a necessary one. Just as a candidate must pick his battles, he must also ration his untruths.
Update 3:37 p.m.: Obama hits back with another spot. (Listen here.) Looks like he's sticking with the true-in-fact-but-not-in-spirit claim that "he's the only candidate who doesn't take a dime from oil
company PACs or lobbyists."
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John Dickerson has a new piece up discussing John McCain’s unlikely new outreach tour through Democratic strongholds. The theory, writes Dickerson, is that “even if voters disagree with McCain, they come away with a favorable gut-level sense of his character when they get to see him up close.” In other words, he wants to develop a visceral connection with voters similar to Obama’s—the factor that may have been (and continues to be) Clinton’s undoing.
Part of that all-round good-guy image for McCain has always been transparency. He’s weirdly diligent about answering questions at press conferences. He’s so generous about letting journalists aboard his campaign bus that they call it the Straight Talk Express without a trace of irony. And now his campaign announces that as president, he would hold a presser at least every two weeks.
If the goal of the new tour is partly to provide contrasts with Obama, the transparency angle is smart. Obama says he would helm the most transparent White House ever, but access on the campaign trail has been anything but complete. (Just ask Lynn Sweet.) And whereas Hillary has developed a reputation for stonewalling the press, Obama gets away with it. McCain may have found a soft spot.
Not that voters are going to cast their ballots based on who holds more press conferences. Nor is transparency an obvious line of attack for the Republican side, where executive-privilege theories have been used to justify greater privacy. But after the eight years of a president whose first and only media instinct has been to bunker down, both nominees would likely benefit from a bit more openness.