They may not flock en masse to her, but she'll get enough to clinch as soon as reality sets in with the rest of the party. Aping MLK does not make him MLK. Getting support from Ted Kennedy does not make him JFK.

Thanks for tolerating me on your site.  I realize that I'm not going to convince you and your commenters aren't going to change my mind either, but consider this..this race is not about the popular vote, its about delegates..in the same way that the general election is about electoral college, not the popular vote (just ask Al Gore).

I've volunteered on local campaigns and campaigns are about a lot more than the candidate and their stand on the issues.  Campaigns are about raising money, getting volunteers, allocating resources effectively, targeting voters for GOTV, messaging, etc.

On that front, Barack Obama has run a brilliant campaign.  He has turned squeezing out delegates into an art form.  BTD had noted the unfairness in that districts with an even number of delegates needed a 62% margin of victory to get an extra delegate while odd delegate districts needed 51% for an extra delegate.  Obama targeted odd districts and only went after even delegate districts if they thought they could get 62%.

Compare that to Hillary's campaign..Mark Penn is purported to have thought that winning California would give them all of those delegates.  It didn't.  Hillary has run an awful campaign..this was her election to lose and lose she did.

Exhibit A is the Idaho primary.  There is no reason in the world why Obama should have won by such a margin and it has everything to do with a poor ground operation on the part of the Clinton campaign.  Trust me..caucus goers don't just show up by themselves, they are all about GOTV..clearly Clinton didn't have one.  Furthermore, there is no reason that Clinton should have lost the Texas two-step, other than incompetence on the part of her campaign.  Clinton had no trouble getting her supporters out to the Nevada or Iowa caucuses.  However, her campaign spent all their resources on trying to blow things out on Super Tuesday.

And the writing was on the wall for a long time.  How on earth did Hillary spend $40 million to win re-election as a Senator in a blue state against a nobody challenger?  She should have easily won spending a fraction of that sum and she would have had that money for this election.

You've noted on a number of occasions where Obama outspent Hillary on ads..well if she wasn't spending a fortune on Mark Penn, she would have had more money to spend on ads.

However, instead of conceding defeat, the Clinton campaign is engaged in trying to change the metrics.  Its no longer about the rules that were there when the game started.  Its about seating MI and FL.  If we knew that MI and FL were to get all their delegates, Obama would have had his name on the ballot in MI and he would have campaigned like hell in those places to win.  He's shown that when he as the opportunity to campaign and introduce himself to voters, he can narrow the gap.

If this was about popular vote from the beginning things would have been run differently.  For one, if we made it about popular vote, every caucus state would turn their elections into primaries.

I think his popularity may have declined over time, but more important is the democratic nature of normal elections--or should I say, the undemocratic nature of caucuses.

It's easy to vote in a normal election.  Everybody can vote once, and their voices all count equally.

In a caucus, not everyone can participate.  You have to have a solid chunk of time free.  Not everyone participates equally.  People who are better-organized have undue influence.

Caucuses tend to be dominated by activists and other people with lots of free time.  They aren't representative of Democrats in general.  The activists think that's just fine.

don't be so quick to discount the advantage the MSM's "lovefest" gave sen. obama, mostly in the early stages of the primary campaign, before people got a chance to know him for real. it made up significantly for his lack of name recognition.

of course, the lovefest ends the day he (if he does) becomes the actual dem. nominee. something i'm betting his campaign hasn't planned for. sen. clinton doesn't have that problem, the MSM has hated her for 16 years now. for her campaign, it'll just be business as usual.

Yes, some stats favor Clinton in the GE, but Obama  isn't far behind either, and in other metrics, he is ahead.

Honestly, the "she's more electable" argument, while having some truth to it, does not strike me as so overwhelmingly convincing that it warrants throwing out the present situation in favor a mild hypothetical, not mentioning the political upheaval costs.

The shorter version of your argument seems to be: Hillary is running a close second while Obama is next to last. It all depends how you choose to interpret the data.

Caucuses do reflect party activist sentiment, whereas primaries are clearly a better gauge of voter sentiment. Caucuses are something of an improvement over the smoke-filled rooms of yore, as you don't have to be a paid-up Regular Party Member to participate, but historically true "outsider" or "insurgent" candidates have relied on primaries to prove their real strength to the Party Elders.

But of course that's the real irony (largely lost on Obama supporters in the blogosphere), as it's Obama, not Clinton, who is the candidate of the Regulars -- it should be pretty clear that the Regulars were simply waiting to see which candidate would be the leading opponent to Clinton, and they coalesced around him. It helps as well that he was the official Chicago Machine candidate from the get-go.

There is nothing "unfair" about this -- it may be stupid and wrong, but not "unfair". Stevenson got the nominations in '52 and '56 even though he was arguably a less "popular" candidate than Kefauver, and of course Humphrey won the '68 nomination even though he fared poorly in the primaries.

450 Million dollars blown on a Dean Pelosi party building effort, that's fraud in my view..

This ridiculous argument that a Clinton nominee turns over any ones will is propaganda that's the other piece of the shell game with delegates apportioned by the DNC  not on number of votes or any persons WILL, but weighted with only the DNC special blend of fake math.

In fact, the opposite has occurred. And it's obvious why: his proportional win goes down so dramatically between caucus and primary that the increase in overall votes can't make up for it: he still loses votes.

What does this suggest very strongly?

It's wrong that a caucus vote counts more in the percentage of delegates received.

The system for choosing gets worse while the way the population is educated about the candidates and issues is no better.