Hillary Clinton needed a BIG win; something along the lines of a landslide to have any realistic chance of getting the Democratic Nomination.
It did not happen.
Put aside all of the spin and the public relations victory she may have won with last night’s Pennsylvania primary. The cold, hard truth rests in the numbers. And all of the numbers belong to Barack Obama.
Going into the Pennsylvania contest, team Clinton knew that they had little chance of winning the pledged delegate count (delegates chosen by voters). They knew that Obama had already won the most states. So, what they wanted to do was attempt an enormous win that would propel them to victory in the popular vote.
They failed. And Pennsylvania was their last chance to catch up.
Numbers don’t spin. Numbers don’t lie: Hillary Clinton ended the month of March in debt. Barack Obama, thanks to a grassroots funding apparatus bankrolled by thousands of small donations from ordinary Americans, ended March with over 40 million dollars in the bank.
She needs money…..fast!!!. How many people are willing to donate money to a candidate that has no chance to win during a recession?
Numbers don’t spin. Numbers don’t lie: The remaining states to be contested do not offer Clinton the opportunity to significantly gain on Obama in any way. Clinton simply lost too many states earlier in the year to be competitive.
Here are the remaining states in play:
• Guam (May 3rd)
• Indiana (May 6th)
• North Carolina (May 6th)
• West Virginia (May 13th)
• Kentucky (May 20th)
• Oregon (May 20th)
• Montana (June 3rd)
• South Dakota (June 3rd)
• Puerto Rico (June 7th)
Clinton, who prides herself in her ability to win BIG states (while often not campaigning and even ignoring smaller states), ironically does not have the population base from these “smaller” states to overcome her earlier defeats. To make things more difficult, polling shows that she is 20 points behind Obama in North Carolina and 5 points behind in Indiana (which borders Obama’s home state of Illinois).
Clinton has lost any claim to the popular vote argument. It belongs to Obama. And his margin of victory will get larger.
As she awakes this morning, she realizes that her victory in Pennsylvania was not sufficient enough to change anything. When she opens the newspaper, she sees that another superdelegate, Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry, has endorsed Barack Obama today.
From the Governor of very conservative Oklahoma: “Senator Obama is uniquely positioned to unite our nation and move beyond the divisiveness and partisan skirmishes that too often characterize politics as usual in Washington."
As she flips further through the paper, she sees a scathing rebuke of her candidacy from the New York Times, the same hometown paper that endorsed her candidacy in January: "The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it."
"Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election."
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