Clinton's Road Ahead

Pennsylvania could not come any sooner for Hillary Clinton. She desperately needs the country to hibernate for the next two weeks and wake up when PA votes. Here's why.

It has almost become a mathematical impossibility for her to capture the nomination. She needs to win by a 60-40 margin over Barack Obama in the remaining nine contests, but you and I know that's not going to happen.

Sure, she has the clear-cut advantage in states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky because poor whites adore her.

But Obama's clear advantages in states like North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, and Montana could easily cancel out any delegate gains she makes. And she desperately needs to close the gap in the pledged delegate count.

RealClearPolitics.com has Obama up by 164 pledged delegates, and has Clinton up by 28 super delegates. Her lead in that category was as large as 100 at the zenith of her campaign.

But these are hardly good times for the Clinton campaign. Mark Penn--Clinton's campaign advisor and long-time friend--stepped down from his position for his affiliation with the very Nafta policies that Clinton (supposedly) opposes.

And she recently had to defend her statement that Obama could not win in November. Since the Rev. Wright thing has died down, the Clinton campaign has not been in such good shape.

But back to my earlier point. The math. She just can't overtake his lead in pledged delegates. She just can't. And I can't remember the last time that Clinton gained the endorsement of a super delegate--influential or otherwise--and it seems like Obama gets about one per day.

She is also behind by about 850,000 votes in the national popular vote, and has won fewer states that Obama. Her strongest arguments to super delegates are "Hey look, we won more virtual electoral votes than him!" or "Don't endorse him yet, pretty please!" No wonder she's losing.

At this point, Clinton needs to take baby steps--deal one primary at a time. She is certainly not out of this race, but she's dangerously close to the point of no return.

She needs to once again prove her resilience to the super delegates with a 15 or 20 point win in Pennsylvania to slow or stop the flow of super delegates to Obama until voting ends on June 3rd.

That will begin the process of closing Obama's pledged delegate lead. From there, she can look ahead to North Carolina to try and pull even there, and to Indiana, where she has a good shot of winning.

She needs to play her cards exactly right to overtake Obama in either the pledged delegate total, the popular vote, or the number of states won to have a legitimate argument to make to superdelegates come June.