The Clintons and their surrogates love to talk about "counting all the votes," "popular vote totals," "caucuses don't count," "Florida and Michigan should," and etc., all aimed at "influencing the superdelegates to do what is best for the party, giving it/us the best chance of winning in November." Of course those popular vote totals, as well as exit poll results, are possibly skewed by some totally indeterminate, undetermined, and undeterminable amount in those states, such as Indiana, where Limbaugh and his concealed Republican backers have attempted to make Operation Chaos operational.

A common theme in this Clinton-talk is that "the superdelegates," all 800 or so of them, are sitting out there is some totally uncommitted group, waiting to see the outcome of all the primaries. Especially for the Clintons, that "outcome" would include the popular vote totals of Michigan and Florida gathered in violation of party rules (as if there were some system that determined the Party's nominee by popular vote). These are all arguments in support of the Clintons' "we won't drop out, now or ever" position. And so, this is the Clinton language: "all the votes," "popular vote," and "the superdelegates" as if they were some sort of amorphous glob.

(By the way, how do you determine when some supposedly undecided superdelegate or supposedly "neutral" election observer really is a Clintonite? When they use that vocabulary, as I heard uttered over the past couple of days by one leader of a national young Democrats organization who described himself as "uncommitted" and one self-described "Democratic" election analyst who described himself as "neutral.")

However, even if one accepts their language and their new rules for picking the party's nominee, one does need to (sorry Hillary and Bill) inject a dose of reality into this situation to understand what is really going on. (Since I am a physician, I do sometimes think in terms of doses.) Given the math of the already elected delegates, it has been concluded (for some time actually) by virtually all of the professional, truly neutral, observers that Clinton has virtually no chance of catching Obama in elected delegates. The Clintons also know that popular votes don't count, so it doesn't matter whether or not the votes of Michigan and Florida are recognized. (I did see one news item that said that the Clintons have accumulated enough votes on the DNC Rules Committee to overturn the previously adopted rules that exclude Michigan and Florida, so they do have that hole card to play in extremis, if they are really intent on destroying the Democratic Party.) And so that's why exactly they and their surrogates, both announced and unannounced, keep talking about the superdelegates as if the whole bunch of them were still in play. But they aren't. And aye, there's the rub for the Clintons.

As of the beginning of this week, there were about 265-270 unannounced superdelegates. Hillary's lead among them is about 15. Obama's lead in elected delegates is (very conservatively) around 130. Let's say that in the remaining primaries it were to drop down to 120. (That's unlikely since projections have him and Clinton most likely breaking even, but let's take that lower end number.) That means that Clinton would have to pick up about 190 of the remaining (publicly) uncommitted superdelegates to overtake Obama in the delegate count. How likely is that, with Obama steadily picking up more superdelegate pledges than the Clintons are, even from Joseph J. Andrew of Indiana, who was the last DNC Chair under the last Pres. Clinton, who publicly switched from H. Clinton to Obama?

So it's 270 superdelegates that we are talking about; a movement of superdelegates to Obama, not to Clinton. It's about the Clintons needing to pick up 190 of the remaining 270 or so superdelegates, when the flow of the latter has been steadily towards Obama. It's about "working hard and playing by the rules" that we are talking about.

(Who said that when he was President? Slips my mind somehow. Couldn't be someone who now advocates either not playing by the rules or changing them as the game goes along, could it? Forgetting about everything else in the Clintons' strategy, what does this latter observation tell us about what a Clinton II Presidency would look like. For those who believe that first and foremost THE issue for the next President, once in office, is a total rejection of Bush II and his total rejection of playing by the rules, not a happy prospect.)

The Clintons obviously thought their pouncing on the Rev. Wright thing, on the Prof. Ayers thing, and the "thus he is unelectable" thing, would swing uncommitted superdelegates their way. Au contraire, mon ami. Assuming that Sen. Obama does win the nomination and then goes on to win the Presidency, these past few weeks will likely be looked upon as the time of the Great Miscalculation by the Clintons. They thought that they could win by playing Rovian politics to win over superdelegates. One of the central planks for Obama is a total rejection of that game, which is why he continues to not respond in negative kind, even there is plenty of ammo there.

There are plenty of superdelegates who like Obama's detailed proposals for this and that (and despite the claims of the Clintons, there are plenty of them). My guess is that the superdelegates who are coming on board for Obama now are just sick and tired of the old Atwater/Rove politics, especially when it happens within the Democratic Party. And for many of them, already somewhat sick and tired of the Clintons, what they have done recently in their tactics is just icing on the "let's go with Obama" cake. Enough experienced politicians seem to know that yes, Virginia, there is a chance that a highly intelligent candidate, speaking to the American people with the confidence that they too can vote intelligently if a politician gives them the chance to do so, can win in November.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly Contributing Author for the Web zine The Political Junkies.net [1]; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online; and an invited contributor to the Web log The Daily Scare [2].

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