This is funny. As part of the frantic number crunching that Clinton supporters are doing to convince themselves that Hillary might win the nomination, Jerome Armstrong makes this interesting observation :

A curious fact is that, though Clinton and Obama are about tied in the popular vote, it takes about 960 more votes for Clinton to gain a single pledged delegate, as it has for Obama (overall). That is, after nearly all the contests, for every 11790 votes Clinton gets, she’s earned a pledged delegate, and for every 10800 votes that Obama has gotten, he’s earned a pledged delegate.

That’s pretty significant, when you consider that it represents about a 9% hardship for Clinton, or a 9% handicap for Obama, in comparison.

Yes, the candidate who had so much institutional support that she had a 100 delegate lead before any votes were even cast now is apparently losing because she faced a pledged delegate “hardship”. The way this is written makes is seem as if Clinton had to work harder than Obama for her delegates because Obama got a “9% handicap”. This is, of course, complete rubbish. Even if Clinton and Obama were “about tied in the popular vote”, the reason for Obama’s lower vote/delegate ratio is because his campaign is much smarter than Clinton’s and realized that it was foolish to concentrate Super Tuesday states and hope that their campaign’s “inevitability” would be enough to get superdelegates to push them over the top.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s universal name recognition, large network of wealthy donors, and support throughout every level of the Democratic establishment, she lost because her campaign wasn’t as good at Obama’s when it came to one important skill…winning elections. The Clintons can be as dismissive as they want about Obama sweeping up victories in “states that don’t matter”, when it comes to the convention, a delegate is a delegate and Obama has more of them. Since the same is going to be true in November with the Electoral College, I think Democrats will probably be better off with a candidate who understands the rules of the election (regardless of their fairness) before the election.