When does victory spell defeat? When you need a miracle rather than a mere good win. That was Sen. Hillary Clinton’s dilemma before the Pennsylvania primary last week, and it remains her obstacle with eight diminishing contests to go.
With the Democratic Party’s superdemocratic system of apportioning convention delegates according to everyone’s proportion of popular votes, she has no realistic chance of overtaking Sen. Barack Obama’s narrow lead in elected delegates. She will be fortunate to win, by any margin, half of the remaining state elections, only one of which — North Carolina — has a rich delegate prize. Her best hope there is to hold Obama to a close victory.
What her 10-point triumph in Pennsylvania on Tuesday did was keep on life support her single strategy, persuading the undecided superdelegates that Obama, despite his big margin in states won, cannot win in the big industrial states that the Democrat must win in November. Of the 10 largest states, Obama has won only two — Georgia and his home state of Illinois — and he is expected to win the 10th, North Carolina.
She has, in fact, won the big states by significant margins. If the Democrats apportioned delegates the way Republicans do in most states — the leading vote-getter by the slightest margin gets all the delegates — she and not Obama would be leading in delegates today and there would be calls for him to leave the race for the good of the party. And if the Republicans used the purer democratic system of the Democrats, John McCain today would be far short of nomination and fighting for his political life, against Mike Huckabee and probably Mitt Romney.
Now, Clinton must win the two remaining heartland states, Indiana and Kentucky, to keep plausible the theory that she is better suited to carry a region that is central to a Democratic victory. But it does not end there. She then must do better than split the remaining states and territories, all of which favor Obama except Puerto Rico. She could claim then to lead in total popular votes and in voting power in key states, though not quite in elected delegates. (The unuttered argument is that she also can get the votes of white men who will not vote for a black man, a cohort that polls suggest may be as high as 15 percent.) All of that would produce a powerful incentive for wavering superdelegates to embrace her.
That is an electoral strategy that seems improbable but not impossible. And it entails a daunting risk: What kind of campaign must she wage to do it, and how much harm does she do to the eventual nominee, whether it be she or he?
