And how is that against the rules or stealing?

Obama is roungly 180 delegates shy of 2025 right now. He'll get there through a combination of pledged and super. How is that stealing?

Listen, it is true that they both need supers to win, but his position is infinitely superior to hers. If she was in his position, and he in hers, the calls would be for him to drop out (if he wasn't asked to do so at the end of Feb). The party has given her every legit chance to rock his boat and take the momentum into the end. She failed. It happens. It isn't her fault, it is just the circumstances. Again, any other year she probably would have beaten the field easily. Not this time.

twice as many states, more delegates, more votes, better fund raising, better ground game that he built by himself.

Yeah, he has a mandate, as much as anyone can get a mandate during a primary.

It's 100% legit. The supers are completely within the rules.

Actually Obama, by May 20th, will have the majority of pledged delegates available, as in he will have more than 50% of them. Therefore if there were no super delegates he would have won.

So yes, it will be a legitimate victory.

I don't get your point. There's no way for ANY candidate to win without the superdelegates. So should they just bag it for this year and not nominate anybody?

Even if it goes to the convention, supers will still decide. So why leave their intent unknown until the convention gets here and lose months of campaigning against McCain?

The truth is, what should happen is that Hillary and her campaign would look at the pledged delegate count, understand that the super-delegates are not going to overturn that, and drop out. But, like our current president, she is so divorced from reality that she is going to keep plugging and FORCE the super-delegates to make a declaration, whether at the convention or beforehand.

Clinton would need the Supers to win as well even at the convention so I don't understand your concern that a win with votes from the Super Delegates isn't legit. Even with Michigan and Florida seated in full and favoring Clinton; neither can win the necessary delegate numbers without supers.

Who exactly is that you are accusing of throwing MI and FL on the ash heap of politics? I remind you that Hilary signed a pledge that MI and FL not count -- and her advisors and proxies on the rules committee all voted at the time for that DQ rule (and when she was running in Iowa and New Haampshire, she was outspoken in her support for the enforcement of the rule). The, as fate would have it, she won those two states, and lost the election as a whole, and now her only conceivable path to the nomination involves breaking that pledge and counting two states where her opponent did not participate -- one where he wasn't even on the ballot. Do you think she would be so insistent about this if she had lost one or both?

So now she has cheated on that pledge -- she left her name as the only name on the ballot in MI, and insists that we count MI and FL despite her written pledge not to do so, and her numerous prior votes and statements in support of DQ'ing FL and MI -- and the candidate who is huirt by that is supposed to roll over and let her get away with it? The very fact that she is making this argument and putting MI andf FL at issue (and saying that she will push it to the convention floor) is what is hurting the party here. Everybody else in the party understands that, inlcuding many who live in MI and FL.

So, my answer to you is "nice try, but no." It is not enough to say that "yes, I agreed to the rule and to the pledge, but we need to do something to seat these two states and so I want you to enforce the voting that took place when all of the other candidates honored the pledge and I didn't because it benefits me. If you want MI and FL seated, let her pull out of the race, and they will be seated in an instant. But they will not be the medium through which a cheater and a liar wins the nomination.

It's OVER. Your candidate lost, get a grip and MOVE ON.

If Clinton led in pledged delegates, it would not be a problem. She does not. Obama does have the lead in pledged delegates.

If the supers did that it would still be legit. It wouldn't be smart politics because there is no real rational for it; but it would be legit for sure.

Louisville -- Right now, Obama has 1840 delegates and Hilary has 1644 delegates -- which includes superdelegates that have committed to one of the two candidates (and she actually leads slightly in superdelegates who have committed to her campaign, although they are very close to dead even on that metric with the last few defections and commitments made today). In other words, Obama holds a 53-47% lead in delagates (actually, 52.8% to 47.2%). That's greater than a 5% lead, which is decisive, not close. And if you eliminate the superdelgates from that count, themargin is even greater -- without superdelegates counted at all, the consensus is that Obama has

Now with all due respect -- and that's not much, candidly -- if party elites take the nomination away from the candidate with 53% of the delegates and give it to the candidate with 47% of the delegates, that will be a problem -- not just for me, but for anybody with even the slightest sense of democratic values. If they get behind the candidate with 53% of the delegates, that will not be a problem. You see, unless he is unelectable -- irremediably tainted in ways that the electorate did not have a fair or timely opportunity to evaluate through the primary and caucus process, then the SD's can act to save the party from that type of unexpected development. And if it turns out that You Tube has video of Obama molesting young boys, like a priest, or cheering on the Rev. Wright when he was spouting anti-semitic or anti-American hyperbole, than the SDs can protect the party, and I will be the first to applaud them for doing that. But short of that, to upset the close, but decisive, will of the voters would be the ultimate act of elitism and would very likely tank the party's chances going into the general election. If I were a young person or an African American who is enthusiastically supporting Obama, who is winning 53%-47%, and I saw the party elites and insiders take the nomination away from Obama and hand it Hilary because they think she would appeal more to blue collar working class democrats in a few rust belt states, I would be infuriated and might well sit out the election rather than vote for a party that would act in so unedmocratic a fashion. So short of a You Tube video of Obama blowing a dog, or diddling a child, I think you need to get a grip, face reality, and accept the fact that the great Clinton machine lost one.

As the Electoral College predictor website (http://www.electoral-vote.com/) wrote today in its analysis of last night's results:

In order for Hillary Clinton to catch up, she is going to have to win 187 of these 217 [pledged delegates remaining to be chosen] or 86%. This is an impossible task given that the two candidates are expected to split the six remaining contests (Kentucky, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico for Clinton; Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota for Obama). Suppose Clinton gets an average of 55% in her states and 45% in his states. Then Clinton gets 15 (WV), 28 (KY), 23 (OR), 30 (PR), 7 (SD), and 7 (MT) for a total of 110. Obama gets 13 (WV), 23 (KY), 29 (OR), 25 (PR), 9 (SD), and 8 (MT) for a total of 107. All in all, she nets 3 delegates. If we add these numbers to the AP's totals, we get Obama 1947, Clinton 1794 with 308 supers yet to announce. Obama will also be ahead in the popular vote and in the number of states won. All Obama would need is 78 of the 308 supers (25%). Clinton would need 75% of them. Would the supers massively decide to overturn the preference of the voters? Considering that many of them are elected officials, they are very sensitive to what the voters want. A congressman in a district that voted for Clinton could support her on the grounds that his constituents wanted that (regardless of the national totals) but a congressman whose district went for Obama would be inviting a primary challenge by ignoring both his own district and the national results."

Moreover, consider the reality that most Superdelegates who support Hilary have announced theeir support already -- not announcing their support for her by this point is pretty near fatal for her campaign -- so the 306 SDs who are undeclared are most likely leaning Obama or truly undecided, and looking for cover before they commit (since they do not want to face Clintonian revenge if they support Obama and he then loses). It is for this reason that so many of us have seen the battle for the nomination as pretty much over since Hilary got beaten decisively in Wisconsin. The delegate numbers since then are almost unchanged, despite the perception that she has had the momentum during that period -- in fact, by an accident of timing, several of her strongest states held their primaries in March and April (and she actually substantially underperformed the margins she once held in those states over Obama, and failed to achieve margins that she absolutely needed to have in those states in order to have any chance at winning the nomination). Her campaign has been one tactical disappointment after another, and the 13 in a row that she lost in Febriary sealed the deal -- she had no back-up strategy if Super Tuesday did not produce the victory she expected, and the consequence of one dimensional thinking are now playing out.

No, this one is over, and asking us to endorse a superdelegate coup d'etats which installs Hilary over the popular will of the voters who participated in the primaries and caucuses, on the theory that Obama needs superdelegates also in order to get the 2049 delegates he also needs to win, is lame. She should have thought about this scenario back in January, when she saw herself as the presumptive nominee.