So this week, we have the meeting of the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) of the Democratic Party.  They will be ruling on the seating of the Florida and Michigan Delegates.  This will officially be a debacle that insures the Democratic primary will continue, unresolved, until the convention.  Before I get into how this is going to go badly, let's outline the race as it now sits.

As of today, Obama has 1981 delegates and Hillary has 1780 delegates.  In order to win the nomination, under the current rules, one of them must secure 2025 delegates.  That would equate to the necessary 50% of recognized delegates to get the nomination.  Obama is 44 delegates away from that number.  Now, given that, after Montana, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico, the likely totals based on current polling look like this:

Obama: 2012
Clinton: 1827

That still leaves Obama 13 delegates away from the magic number.  There are current 194 uncommitted super delegates that are recognized under the current rules.  So Obama is pretty close to a complete victory here, but that gets us back to the RBC and my constant reference to "the current rules".  One of three scenarios play out in the RBC:

Current Rules Stand

In this scenario, the RBC rules that the delegates from Florida and Michigan will not be seated and that will continue to be the case.  With a handful of super delegates, Obama can clinch the victory.  The trouble here is two fold.  First of all, Hillary will claim that those voters are being disefrannchised, and she'll take this to the convention.  See, at the convention, the credentials committee has the final authority, not the RBC.  So in essence, this is a court ruling, but it can be take on appeal to the supreme court of the credentials committe. 

Now here's the nasty part of this.  Let's assume for the moment that all 194 of the remaining super delegates decided to back Obama after the RBC meeting.  That would give him 2,206 delegates, more than enough to win under that ruling.  The problem is that the number to win a decisive victory under the Clinton scenario is 2,209.  So he would be 3 votes shy of declaring victory under all conditions which is what he needs to shut Hillary down.  So she has the justification to keep fighting to the convention and the debacle continues

Partial Seating

In this scenario some portion of the Florida and Michigan delegates are seated.  This would likely be half of the delegates.  This would up the magic number to 2118, and would add 33.5 delegates for Obama from Florida, and 0 from Michigan, and would add another 15 super delegates to the pool.  In this scenario, the most Obama can get is 2254.5 which would give him a chance at total victory, but it would still be long odds to get to that total.

Having said all that, the justifications for Hillary to continue her campaign remain and we still have a debacle.

Full Seating

In this situation, the sanctions against Florida and Michigan are essentially ignored.  Trouble is, that the DNC has ruled that this scenario is not permitted to happen and that only a 50% seating of delegates is permitted.  That ruling, so far as I know, is binding for the RBC, and not binding for the credentials committee.  Therefore, this scenario cannot happen and we're left with one of the two above scenarios.

Ironically, at this point, in spite of a full seating appearing to benefit Clinton greatly, the truth is that by seating them completely, it would clear the air and allow for this to get settled before the convention.  Even under the most generous Clinton scenario, she would still lose in the pledged delegate count, and though it would raise the final delegate bar, it would also open up enough super delegates to provide a chance to resolve this. 

But like I said, that scenario, so far as I understand it, cannot happen at this point.

The DNC Botched This HORRIBLY

I like Howard Dean, but this primary has been an awful mess.  I know they didn't see this coming and if you told anybody back in August of last year, when those rulings were made about Florida and Michigan that it would be this close, they'd have laughed at you.  Regardless, the precedent this sets is horrible no matter how this plays out. 

If this situation comes up in the future, every state will have an incentive to hold their primary early on the assumption that, if it's close, they'll still have influence.  Every candidate will have every reason to run their campaigns in every state, no matter how the delegates are said to be counted.  If Obama had kept his name on the ballot in Michigan, cheating like Hillary, and had he campaigned in Florida, cheating like Hillary, there would be zero doubt about the state of this campaign.  Instead, he did the right thing, and is being punished for it.

File under "no good deed goes unpunished" I guess. 

Hillary is pushing for seating of Florida and Michigan delegates.  Fine.  Let's seat them, because this is how the math works using even the most generous pro-Hillary bias:

• Seat 105 delegates for Hillary and 67 for Obama in Florida as per election results
• Seat 73 delegates for Hillary and ZERO for Obama in Michigan (notably there were 55 uncommited delegates)
• Seat ALL of Floridas super delegates for Hillary (26)
• Seat ALL of Michigan's super delegates for Hillary (29)

Now, let's look at the remaining contests.  Based on current polling with a slightly pro-Hillary generosity, here's how it breaks down, roughly:

• +7H, +9O - Montana
• +7H, +8O - South Dakota
• +33H, +22O - Puerto Rico

So, what does that bring our totals to?

Barack Obama: 2068
Hillary Clinton: 2057

She STILL loses even in that completely ludicrous scenario.  Oh, what about the popular vote you say?  The only way Hilalry gets the popular vote lead at this point is if you ignore all the people who showed up and voted uncommitted because neither Obama nor Edwards were on the ballot. 

Rumor has it that Bill Clinton is actively pushing for the Obama/Hillary dream ticket.  The truth is, this would be a nightmare.  Aside from the apparent hostage scenario we have going on where Hillary could be less than supportive of Obama if she isn't on the ticket, I see little value to Obama in having her on there. 

The only plausible reason to get Hillary on there is to appease female voters who backed Hillary to the bitter end.  But there are other ways to woo those voters.  I mean realistically, are democratic women going to want McCain as president?  How well do you think women's rights will fair under a Supreme court with another couple conservative judges?  I guarantee you that, in order to get the support of folks like Hagee, McCain has committed to putting some real wackaloons on the court. 

Furthremore, with Hillary on the ticket, it will energize a demoralized Republican base.  I know of many Republicans who are not thrilled with McCain.  My father, who has danced around the idea of voting libertarian more than once, might very well do it this year with McCain on the ticket.  But throw Hillary on there and I gurantee you're going to see a lot of Republicans showing up just to vote against Hillary.  Why would you want that liability.

Besides, after all the questioning of Obama's "ready on day one" capability by Hillary, does this make any sense at all?  I mean what's that going to look like when the VP of your ticket is quoted over and over again talking about how you're not ready for this job?  On every level this would be a TERRIBLE idea.  On the bright side, it seems that Jim Webb is looking like the presumptive VP, and that would be an awesome choice.

Webb has military and foreign policy experience.  Webb is very much an economic populist.  He gets some credibility as a bi-partisan choice since he served under the Reagan administration.  Furthermore, if you want somebody who's got credibility on Iraq, who better than one of the few people with a son serving in that war?  He's a perfect choice.  If Hillary wants some concessions to finally put her campaign down, fine, but the VP job makes no sense at all.

Clinton , in reference to an article in AP:

"[the article] found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

I work.
I work hard.
I'm white.
I wouldn't vote for her if you paid me at this point.

Oh wait, I completed college and therefore, my education has taught me enough to know not to vote for her.  My bad. 

I have a thought that I wanted to throw out there.  This is still in a primordial state, so I'd like to get people's feedback on this and see if I'm onto something here.  With Hillary Clinton's campaign, I've begun to wonder if perhaps, because she's a woman, she's been allowed to get away with a lot more than she otherwise would have. 

My logic is like this.  It is well established, that as a woman, she faces a lot of difficulty in overcoming that portrayal as a bitch, shrill, etc.  If she is aggressive, assertive, etc, these all come off as traits that are considered inappropriate in a woman even though they are appropriate in a politician.  So there's that dichotomy that makes it difficult for women to rise to power.  I get this, and I've said more than once that I think that works against her more than being a black man works against Obama.

Having said that, I believe there is a flip side to this.  That, aware of that issue, people have been less inclined to call her on this kitchen sink, negative attack strategy.  That if she were a man doing this, her credibility would have been more quickly attacked, and that her negatives would have skyrocketed even faster than they did.  Furthermore, I believe many of her supporters are more willing to let that stuff slide because they see her as being at a disadvantage and figure that she's driven to it by the system aligned against her. 

Thoughts?  Am I on to something, or am I just being a pig? :)

If you wanted evidence of why using delegates is a fair proxy for popular support, look at these numbers:

Obama - Popular Vote - 14.4 million - 50.9%
Hillary - Popular Vote - 13.9 million - 49.1%

Obama - Delegate Count - 1,699 - 52.4%
Hillay - Delegate Count - 1,545 - 47.6%

Now you might be thinking, hey, waidaminnit, that means he gets a distorted advantage by using the delegate count!  Well, no, not really, because that vote total doesn't include the caucus states.  If we add in an approximation of the popular turnout in caucus states, we get this:

Obama - Popular Vote - 14.8 million - 51.2%
Hillary - Popular Vote - 14.1 million - 48.8%

So the delegate count is only off of the popular vote count by .3%.  So the delegates are a fair approximation of popular support, give or take the ridiculous superdelegate element which can totally ignore popular sentiment. 

By the way, for the record, Hillary is now behind in both popular and delegate counts except in the very unfair circumstance of adding in all of Florida and all of Michigan.  Even if you give her Florida, she still doesn't get the lead.  In Michigan, Obama wasn't on the ballot, and uncommitted won a whopping 40.7% of the vote. 

So it's not really a fair comparison to give her all of the Michigan votes she unfairly won and give Obama none of those uncommitted votes that would have likely aligned for him.  In that scenario where you add in Michigan for her, she'd only be up by 12,000 votes overall, and so even if you assumed that the undecideds broke heavily in her favor, she still doesn't keep an edge.

If you hadn't heard, there's been a recent kurfuffle over Hillary's claim that when she went to Bosnia, it was a dangerous place.  She said that they had to be rushed off because there were snipers in the area, etc.  There's video evidence to the contrary, and it seems to me that this is probably a case of the distortion of memory.  The past is always bigger, more dramatic, etc.  There's a big attack on Clinton now for lying about what really happened, but it seems a small issue to me.

What is worth considering about this though is that she's talking about this as part of her argument that she's going to be good on national security issues.  So, let me see if I understand this logic:

We should vote for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate because she was once threatened by snipers and will thus be able to beat the Republican candidate who served in the military, was shot down, and then tortured. 

Wha?  There's not a lot of people who can legitimately claim real national security experience that would give them some sense of what a President's job is.  The government jobs I can see having some relevance to it would be Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State.  Maybe a few other department heads like the DNI, etc, might have a sense of it.  But let's be clear, NONE of the candidates running have that experience. 

Barring that direct experience, whether you were shot at a couple times, or a lot of times, or tortured, or not is irrelevant.  What matters is judgement, foresight and clarity of thought.  A willingness to use military force where it makes sense and a strong hesitation to do so.  You either have that wisdom or you don't and the most experienced commander-in-chief we currently have, George W. Bush, is clearly not in posession of it. 

Okay, the regular news outlets suck. This is a long established fact, but let's get right to the heart of it shall we? I just hit Google News and what's the first headline I see?

Ummm no?  What edge?  She's behind in every conceivable measure of victory by margins too large to recover from.  Sure she can throw dirt on Obama for several more weeks.  Sure she can launch a bunch of racially charged proxy attacks for several more weeks, but it isn't going to get her the victory, it's just going to drive a bigger wedge into the heart of the Democratic party. 

Here's a wonderfully delusional quote from a Clinton campaign ally:


Tie?  What tie?  She's been losing this entire time.  That she's losing less badly than she did during that streak of 12 primaries is an artifact of scheduling, not some indication of momentum.  It appears she netted maybe 4 delegates from her major "comeback" win, and that might decline once Texas is finally certified.  Did I mention that Obama just won 5 delegates in Mississippi?  Yeah, he gained more delegates in one state than Hillary managed to gain in 3 states (two of them being bigger than mississippi). 

So basically imagine you're a football team, down by two touchdowns and with a minute left you manage to score another touchdown but missed the extra point.  Then, you come back to kick the onside kick and the other team not only recovers the ball, but then runs the ball back for a touch down and extra point.  So now you're down 15 instead of 14, and then you start telling any sideline reporter within earshot, "oh the team coming from behind usually wins."  I can almost here John Madden laugh then get back to waxing poetic about crab cakes.

Continuing on, we get to this:


First of all, they don't identify Grossman as a Clinton supporter, which he is.  In fact if you go through that article, there are tons of quotes from Hillary's supports, but almost none from Obama's.  But anyhow, today, Obama is up by a hair over 700,000 votes if you ignore the fact that Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine haven't reported the popular vote tallies from their caucuses.  They don't usually bother with that because delegates are what count.  But anyhow, you add in their popular vote counts and his lead widens.

Now, let's say you seated Florida as is.  Then Obama's lead drops to about 400,000 (continuing to ignore those caucus tallies).  Of course that's an illegitimate measure because Obama didn't have any ground game in Florida because it wasn't supposed to count.  Time and time again, Obama has closed gaps as the election approaches because of his strong ground game.  You could add in Michigan I suppose but Obama wasn't even on the ballot and that would put him up by only 79,000.

But what's telling about how this election is actually going is that the last time I've been watching the popular vote numbers because I know that's what Hillary's trying to win.  When I looked before March 4th, Obama was behind if you included Michigan and Florida.  Now, after Mississippi, for the first time, he's actually ahead even in that situation. 

This is not a horse race.  The only way that Hillary has a shot at winning is by cheating the system.  By seating Florida and Michigan as they are right now, which is clearly against the established rules and obviously unfair to Obama, then by winning large margins in upcoming states, and finally claiming that a popular vote victory built on all those factors is more important than a delegate victory.  That would be rightly perceived as stealing the election and it would be very very bad for the Democrats.

The super delegates need to get their heads out of their asses and come off the fence and end this stupidity before it rips the party apart.  I mean are they really going to come in and hand a victory to Hillary built on all of that?  If they do, I'm done with them and I know a lot of other people who will be too. 

I've been spending more time thinking about what Hillary's plan is.  It seems, at this point, that it's her intention to take the Democratic party hostage as a last ditch effort to get the nomination.  Essentially she's going to go to the party elite and argue that she's at least equal to Obama in electoral popularity.  It's a stretch, but not much of one given how close this election is.  She'll argue that she's the veteran politician here and that Obama should be her VP and then he'd get his shot in 8 years time.  Essentially it'll be the Bob Dole, "it's my time," argument pointing out that Obama's still young and that he'd get valuable experience as her VP.

If it doesn't happen like that, then she holds a knife to the throat of the party and rides this out to the convention.  Then we end up with a brokered and bloody convention where, whomever wins, they'll be weakened.  In the mean time she continues to throw mud on Obama attempting to diminish the sense that he's a viable candidate.  If she's drifted into claiming McCain has the superior commander-in-chief credentials, there's little reason to think she won't dive even deeper into the depths of dirty politics.

To prevent this, Obama will have to similarly convince the party elites to back him sooner rather than later to avoid that drawn out debacle.  It's going to be difficult to convince people to step up and fight against Hillary who's got a ton of chits to play all over the political landscape.  Let's be clear, the Democratic party is not particularly known for having cajones, and there's little reason to think that will change now.  There may be a bridge too far that, if Hillary crosses it, they'll be forced to rally behind Obama, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.  I mean she's already backing McCain over Obama, so if they were going to cry foul, this would be the time to do it.

It's gonna be ugly, that's all I'm sure of at this point.  Mark my words though, If the party elites back Hillary, then they give McCain the election. 

You get the sense I'm losing my patience? :)

But seriously, check out, what she's saying in regards to Samantha Powers being canned :

Well I think Sen. Obama did the right thing, but I think it’s important to look at what she and his other advisors say behind closed doors, particularly when they’re talking to foreign governments and foreign press. It raises disturbing questions about what the real planning and policy positions inside the Obama campaign happen to be.

IT WAS HILLARY FUCKING CLINTON'S CAMPAIGN THAT WAS TALKING TO THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT BEHIND CLOSED DOORS ABOUT NAFTA. 

Stephanie Powers' comment was to a foreign paper, but that's kind of arbitrary.  Anybody can get pissed off and talk to random press person they happen to be talking to. 

I now officially hate Hillary. 

Hillary Clinton is the new Zell Miller. 

Discuss.

(yup, I really don't like her anymore)

Hillary Clinton, speaking today

" think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

I have two responses to this:

• The polite version: Hillary Clinton has never acted in any role that could be described as "commander-in-chief".  She's never been an executive.  She's been a legislator in the Senate for only a little longer than Obama and doesn't have any credentials to show that she's capable in that role. 
  
• The not-polite version: the only commander-in-chief threshold she's crossed is giving BC a BJ, and if that were sufficient qualification, there'd be an awful long line for that job

I'm sorry, it's crude, but I'm losing my patience with her BS.

So you may have heard about the whole NAFTA controversy.  It seems that after being pressed by Tim "Reject and Repudiate" Russert on the issue of NAFTA, both Hillary and Obama said essentially the same thing.  They said they wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and were willing to threaten a withdrawal from the treaty as part of that. 

The controversy began when members of Canda's conservative government leaked a memo indicating that they had received assurances from Obama's campaign indicating that he didn't really mean it like that.  When Obama's campaign was confronted with this, they were clearly thrown off balance by it.  They denied it because and didn't know that anybody in their campaign had done this.  Hillary's campaign jumped on it of course and it's very likely this helped her to carry Ohio by the margins that she did.

Well, upon further review, it turns out that this story is totally backwards.  It seems that it was, in fact, Hillary's people who reassured the Canadian government, saying they should take those comments with a grain of salt.  It seems though that our friends in Canada are favoring a Clinton presidency and decided to do a little disinformation campaign in her favor. 

Nice...

I think though, at the end of the day, both candidates have a similar mindset on it.  They do recognize that there are legitimate benefits to global trade, but that we do need to take into account labor and environmental standards in these deals to insure that global trade doesn't become a race to the bottom.  Neither of them is really going to take us out of NAFTA in spite of Tim's terrible question.  I mean sure, asking for renegotiation has the implied threat, "or else," but I don't see that really ever coming up in those discussions.

It would appear from the exit polls that the reason Hillary won in Texas was because of Republican voters attempting to undermine Obama at the behest of Limbaugh, etc.   Check this out:

It's a similar story in Texas, where Limbaugh has the most listeners of any of these states. Obama won the Republican vote 52-47, but conservatives (22 percent of all voters, up from 15 percent in the Kerry-Edwards primary) went against Obama. For the first time, they were Clinton's best ideological group: She won them 53-43. And Clinton won 13 percent of the people who said Obama was the most electable candidate.

Ohio didn't wind up being very close, but Clinton won the Texas primary by about 98,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast. If the exits are right, about 252,000 of those voters were Republicans, and about 618,000 were conservatives. Clinton truly might have won the Texas primary on the backs of Rush Limbaugh listeners.

Compare that to Wisconsin, minus the Limbaugh effect:

Obama won [Republicans] 72-28 over Clinton. Just as tellingly, 14 percent of primary voters said they were "conservative," and Obama won them 59-40, a bigger margin than he won with liberals or moderates.

There didn't need to be a lot of these dittoheads running around in Texas to swing a 98,000 vote margin. 

Now, if you go and watch the TV coverage you're going to see a bunch of people claiming that Hillary won.  You're going to see talk of a come back, a psychological boost, etc.  But let's get real.  As of this moment:

Ohio: Clinton - 62, Obama - 46
Rhode Island: Clinton - 12, Obama - 8
Vermont: Clinton - 6, Obama - 9

So, from those, you get:

Clinton - 80
Obama - 63

So Obama, before Texas is counted gives Clinton a 17 delegate advantage tonight.  But the Texas primary, in spite of Hillary's narrow margin will go to Obama.  The Texas caucus will largely go to Obama, so odds are that Obama does better than that 17 delegate deficit by the end of the night and tonight ends up going in his favor again.

Lest we forget:

• Obama leads the popular vote
• Obama leads the elected delegate vote
• Obama leads the overall delegate vote
• Obama has won more states

So how the fuck can anybody out there sit here and seriously talk about Hillary remaining in this race.  Now she goes on and loses in Wyoming and Mississippi in the next week.  Then we've got more than a month until Pennsylvania.  Are we really going to grind this shit out for another month because Hillary can't get over her ego and end this insanity?

It seems that some of Hillary's supporters are circulating caucus sign up sheets before the caucus:

http://startelegram.typepad.com/politex/2008/03/fingerpointing.html

Basically the notion is they get a list of voter signatures for their candidate, sneak it into the caucus, and then claim those people showed up when they didn't.  It's illegal and in spite of Hillary's accusations, the only verified occurrence of this was amongst her people, not Obama's. 

Hillary, would you please just give it up while you still have some shred of dignity left?

So it seems a bunch of Hillary's backers got together in February of this year to form the American Leadership Project.  It is a 527, which means it can gather unlimited contributions and spend it's money however it wants so long as:

1. It doesn't tell people to vote for a specific candidate
2. It doesn't coordinate with a candidate

So what happens is that if you're a wealthy backer of Hillary, rather than just capping your donations at the normal $2300 limit, you can go send millions of dollars to this "independent" 527 which will then run ads that help Hillary win the election.  Currently in Texas, this group is running a bunch of ads about Hillary's health care plan that are, at least to some degree, full of crap.

Now technically these folks can't coordinate, but do you think there wasn't at least some discussion between Hillary and these folks before hand about how they could help her.  It wouldn't take a genius to figure out how they can do it without active coordination, and while there may be no clear quid pro quo, I gurantee their millions of dollars spent would increase their influence. 

There are plenty of legitimate 527's that are focussed on specific issues or broader political goals.  But there are also plenty that come up out of nowhere for a specific campaign to essentially bypass McCain-Feingold, and that's what the ALP is.  So far as I can tell the organization doesn't even have a website.

This, incidentally, is why Obama's pledge to take public financing had to be qualified.  If he took public financing, he'd be limited in what he could spend and then 527's back by various conservatives could run rampant.  Furthermore, such an arrangement would take the low dollar donors out of the game for Obama and replace them with the Democratic party high rollers, lobbyists, etc, that could make a 527 overnight to work for him.  That's almost exactly the opposite of what he wants to accomplish.

Slate has a very useful delegate calculator to let prognosticators figure out how this election will go.  On a whim I decided to project who wins if Hillary manages to get a 10 point margin in every race, which is HIGHLY unlikely.  The answer: Obama wins.  In fact, in order for Hillary to win the pleged delegate count, Hillary would have to win every single race for the rest of the campaign by a margin of +16, pulling out a victory by a mere 3 delegates.

Now let's assume that she gets the following:

• Ohio +10 (optimistic but not unreasonable)
  
• Texas +6 (that's very optimistic but if enough Republicans turn out to try to submarine Obama who knows)
  
• Rhode Island +6
• Vermont -10 (she should lose by more than that, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
  

At that point, she'd have to win by +20 in every race after that which is pretty much impossible.  The only race she's won by that kind of margin was the one in Arkansas which she won by +44.  The next closest was New York by +17. 

Even if she won the rest by +18, she'd still lose in pleged delegates by over 80 delegates and it'd be hard to claim the crown with that kind of deficit.  If she could get within say 50 and perhaps claim the popular vote (unlikely with Texas being so close), maybe she'd have an argument.  Oh yeah and did I mention that it still doesn't count all the caucus delegates in Texas? 

So unless she can convince the super delegates to totally ignore the popular sentiment, she's pretty much screwed.

If there's one meme deeply in need of smiting this primary season, it's this notion of momentum.  That a candidate, by winning contests, can somehow gather some kind of energy that will help their performance in future primaries and caucuses.  The ONLY thing that matters in terms of momentum is the notion of viability.  A candidate must prove, either through victories, or media spin, that they are in fact a realistic choice for the presidency.

In the Democratic primary we have two candidates who are both, at this point, viable.  Hillary, far less so, but she's done an effective enough job of clouding the issue that she can remain in it and not have that streak of 12 losses matter for anything today.  Nobody is going to the polls today because of those 12 losses and nobody is staying home because of them either.  Sure, some of the party elites who want to be backing a winner will change their support, but this deep into the campaign, that's becoming largely irrelevant as well.  Dodd backing Obama isn't going to swing the election. 

If you go back to December of last year, Hillary had the "momentum".  But she lost the momentum because Obama won Iowa, right?  No, what happened was that in Iowa, Obama got out a really good ground game and managed to win and demonstrate his viability.  But then Obama got momentum right?  No, he got viability, and that's it. 

If you look at the election, the results have unfolded, state by state, based on the tactics and strategies, and inherent qualities of the candidates campaigning in each state.  Obama didn't win Wisconsin because he won Maryland, he just happened to win them both.  Today, voters in Texas aren't going to look back on the history of this primary and go, "oh I think I'll vote for Obama because he has the momentum."  That concept is simply ludicrous.

I don't even believe that "momentum" has a tremendous effect on the campaigns themselves.  If you appear to be losing momentum, your campaign gets to become the underdog.  If you're gaining momentum, your campaign gets to become the inevitable victor.  Either position can be used to motivate your supporters if you know how to play it right.  Hillary's upper echelon managers have done some reshuffling a bit of back biting, but there's zero evidence that this is playing out in election results.  Nobody's going to go to the polls in Ohio and go, "yeah I'd vote for Hillary, but Mark Penn totally blundered."

After today, odds are that Hillary will be mathematically eliminated from the race.  She'll likely continue to claim viability though independent observers should be able to clearly point out that it's BS.  At that point she doesn't lose momentum, she loses viability, and thus the incentive for people to send her money and get out the vote for her.  Her campaign strategists, seeing the ship has a gaping hole in it, will abandon it, doing it's best to blame somebody else for the failure.  Furthermore, there's strong incentive for the party elites to push her out quickly so that Obama can be crowned and we can consolidate forces against the Republicans. 

Now if you read that it sounds like it's about "momentum" again, but let's say she wins Texas and Ohio by +15-20 and remains mathematically viable.  Does Obama's campaign collapse?  No.  Does she gain some new found power to change the results in Pennsylvania?  No.  Obama will still get money, he'll still have a strong GOTV effort and they'll go to the next contest and the vote their will happen entirely independent of what happens today in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont. 

So, seriously, no mo mo.

Okay here's my stab at prognostication for the March 4th primaries:

• Texas: Obama 49% - Hillary 49%
  
• Ohio: Obama 42% - Hillary 57%

My sense is that Texas will go down to the wire on the popular vote.  It seems that the polls in Texas that had been going in Obama's favor have come back a bit.  It appears that this may be the influence of Republican crossover voters who are looking to vote for Hillary in hopes that she'll stay in and make a mess of things.