DON'T COUNT HILLARY OUT YET

Craig Crawford has an interesting observation on the Michigan-Florida debacle:

How amazing that Democrats have a frontrunner who is seemingly afraid to allow re-votes in Michigan and Florida. Or at least that is how Barack Obama is allowing it to appear.

Obama is all that stands in the way of letting voters try again in those battleground states. That’s probably a winning strategy for the party nomination. But the general election is another story.

For what it’s worth to Democrats, only Hillary Rodham Clinton has ended up with the political incentive to seat the convention delegates from Michigan and Florida. Obama sees no such advantage.

A Democratic national convention without Florida and Michigan suggests the need for an Electoral College strategy that contemplates victory without either state in the party’s November tally.

Yes, the woman who's accused of being willing to do "anything to win" is facing a candidate whose memes of hope, unity, change, and a "new kind of politics" don't prevent him from disenfranchising more than two million voters if they weren't HIS voters.

It's politics, folks. And Obama clearly is as strategic and willing to do "anything" to win as he accuses Hillary of being.

UPDATE: The invaluable Eriposte crunches the numbers of the popular vote and concludes that Hillary could wipe out Obama's popular vote lead with impressive wins in the next primaries:

In other words, given some of Sen. Clinton's current polling leads in PA, it is difficult but not implausible or impossible to see her wipe out Obama's adjusted popular vote lead - including FL/MI, with all of MI's "uncommitted" assigned to Sen. Obama entirely - just in PA alone (setting aside the other contests). She is also on track to end the primary with the popular vote lead amongst primary voters who are Democrats. These are just a couple of reasons why Sen. Clinton is on entirely legitimate grounds in continuing to stay in the primary race and in not listening to the MSM-like blowhards and haters spewing bile at her day in and day out.

Nobody ever won by counting out a Clinton before the fat lady sings.

Run, Hillary, run!

THE POPULAR VOTE AND CAUCUSES

Talk Left has some interesting statistics.

Do you know that if 8,000 voters come out in Wyoming today to select their 13 delegates that means that 615 Wyomingians will be selecting a delegate to our national convention (8000 divided by 13.) By contrast, when 4.4 million Californians voted in their primary, they selected 370 delegates, which is to say 1 delegate for every 11,892 Californian who voted.

The will of the people? Please never mention that phrase again when discussing the pledged delegate count.

From the thread: "The total vote to total delegates is listed as 8553 Obama to 9289 Clinton." In other words, Clinton has had to garner 736 more votes for every delegate she's gotten than Obama has had to get for every delegate he's earned. Boy, that's some disadvantage.

On the popular vote --

Among self-identified Democrats:

Without Florida and Michigan: Hillary +588,000
With Florida: Hillary +820,000
With Florida and Michigan: Hillary +933,000

On another note, I can't believe we've let another four years go by without fixing the Electoral College.