Hillary Clinton's bleak delegate math

Does Obama already have a pledged-delegate majority effectively wrapped up? MSNBC's Howard Fineman says both campaigns think so, as Josh Marshall explains:

[T]he gist of [Fineman's analysis] was that both sides agree that it's highly unlikely that Clinton can end up with more pledged delegates than Barack Obama. And the issue now is how close she can keep the margin.

If she can keep it within a couple dozen delegates, he argued, it would be credible to try to make up the margin with super delegates. On the other hand, if Obama's ahead by 100 or 200, the pressure against trying to make up the margin with non-elected delegates would just be too great.

Sounds about right. Here's the clip:

Comments

[Mad Max, Esquire]

Hillary must be in trouble. She's been in Texas using her fake southern accent again...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxTnHx5qVQU

...I guess she figures it works for Bush, it should work for her.

[dcl]

Who knows, but if she uses super delegates to get the nomination, weather it be one or all seven hundred and ninety four, she loses my vote in the general election. (Of course, as a super delegate, I doubt Obama would vote for her...)

[B. Minich]

Delegate math sounds like one of those really hard college math electives.

[Mike]

Dane, that's not logically sound. The way this fight is going, neither Obama nor Clinton will win their party's nomination without the superdelegates. Neither Obama nor Clinton is responsible for the fact that there are superdelegates in the first place. Their existence is a fact set by the party before either candidate was running. Arguments about losing respect for the candidate based on possible Michigan/Florida shenanigans are one thing, but the existence of superdelegates is tied into the system that the party has agreed to use for quite some time now. These are the rules that the candidates signed up for; it's not realistic to expect them not to try to use those rules to their best advantage.

Would you choose not to vote for one of these candidates because (s)he trails the other one in total popular vote, but still won a nominating number of delegates? This is the same basic concept; despite notions of what the "will of the people is"--number of pledged delegates, popular vote totals, numbers and sizes of states won, proportional systems instead of winner take all or vice versa--the nomination does not depend on any such vague concept, but on a specifically codified set of rules. If you dislike the rules in question, lobby the people in charge of the system to alter the rules. I've long had issues with the Electoral College system - Brendan's paper defending it notwithstanding - but I don't fault the candidates for playing to the system as it's set up.

At the end of the day, your vote in the general election should be for which of the candidates you feel would do the best job as President if elected. The possible MI/FL issues could easily factor into this - you can argue about whether this shows a propensity to change the rules in the middle of the game, and is indicative of a win at any cost mentality. But winning the nomination from the use of superdelegates? What if the superdelegates turn out to be hopelessly deadlocked between Clinton and Obama, and the party eventually picks some third individual as some sort of everyone's next best solution (extremely unlikely, though still imaginable)? Would that person also not get your vote in the general election, no matter who (s)he was running against, simply because of an application of known rules in candidate selection?