Pondering PA

By Newshoggers

by Stacie

A thousand apologies if you're bored with primary race handicapping. I'm a little bored with it myself, and it doesn't appear that the voters of Pennsylvania will bless the rest of America with a conclusion to the primary tomorrow.

Josh has loads of polls up -- here, for instance, but really, TPM is polling central today and rightly so. All but one suggest a solid but not huge Clinton lead, meaning that my hopes for Wednesday's concession speech are almost certainly not going to happen.

Dan Balz tells WaPo readers that, "Her campaign has the aura of a march toward inevitable disappointment," which is my take on it as well, but that doesn't appear to have persuaded Pennsylvanians to force her to throw in the towel. Slate gives us a blow-by-blow of Obama's closing argument, which is worth a read, but here's mine:

Dear Pennsylvania,

The math doesn't work. Hillary Clinton will almost certainly not be the nominee for the Democratic Party in 2008. She is too far behind in delegate totals, and her strategy at this point is to entice elites to overrule the voting public and to finagle a last minute rule change regarding Michigan and/or Florida, rules which she pledged to support earlier in the cycle. It reeks of horrible. Make it stop.

Kthxbye.

Stacie

Obama's actual close is a little better, but at the end of it all, I think my argument is the correct one (I would think that...). If Clinton almost certainly can't gain the nomination, she is serving only to assist McCain by being one tine in a pincer move against the Democratic nominee. Pennsylvania Democrats: we have to win in November. You can end this bloodletting. You should.

She needs to learn it is over

Clinton warned: win decisively or it's over
Ewen MacAskill in Philadelphia and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian, Tuesday April 22 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/22/hillaryclinton.barackobama

Barack Obama yesterday effectively conceded he will not win today's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, but hinted he expected to do well enough to cast doubt on Hillary Clinton's ability to stay in the race.

Obama, who has established an almost unassailable lead in the contest, told Pittsburgh radio station KDKA he did not anticipate emerging victorious from Pennsylvania. But he said: "I'm predicting it's going to be close and that we are going to do a lot better than people expect."

Clinton, after a string of defeats, needs more than just victory to resuscitate her campaign: she must win by 10 percentage points or more to convince the Democratic leadership she should stay in the race.

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