Because Sen. Clinton ran up her negatives sky high, and if she doesn't lose the nomination she definitely will lose in November. McCain will destroy her, all he needs to do is use her own talking points against her.

The Republicans are laughing. They might still win an election that the Dems couldn't possibly lose.

It's a coup by superdelegates. For every Dem voter who thinks this would be a satisfactory outcome there will be 1 or 2 or maybe even 3 who will see it as the reason to abandon the party. Few Independents and virtually no Republicans will support her.

Might be a good jumping-off point for a viable 3rd party of real progressives. Many Indys and Repubs would go for it at this point.

Your "win" in MI only appeals to people who think that banana republics have fair elections when their dictator is the only name on the ballot.

There's a lot wrong with your scenario. Come on. It's also hypothetical that Bush will nuke Iran (with Hillary's vocal approval) before the GE and institute martial law. But let's not quibble over if this is factually accurate...

Hypotheticals are fun, but you should try to have a bit of reality bias in your forecast. No way Oregon or SD are toss ups. Obama will take both by healthy margins and continue to lead in meaningless (or at least as meaningless as the Fla/Mich votes to the Supers) nationwide polling.

I could actually make it potentially even better for Sen. Clinton, but I think this example is a place I can get to without too much stretching.

You and I (for what little my opinion is worth) have evidently a very different idea of what counts as stretching. Your proposed scenario is indeed a great stretch. Clinton has not won (or really even come that close) in a single prairie-mountain state, so your 50/50 races in SD and MT are pure invention and the polls show it. Likewise your narrow win in NC and your 50/50 in OR are altogether quite a reach.

Sure, the scenario you spin is possible, but a darn site shy of plausible. It is altogether more plausible that Obama wins NC and OR by a landslide and pulls off respectable victories in SD, MT, IN and Guam. To the extent that this is meant merely to be a demonstration of the contention that she can win I will concede your point, but to the extent that it is meant to suggest that such an outcome is anything more than a distant unlikelihood I remain unconvinced.

Plus, the high negatives that Hillary has now, which are ALREADY higher than anyone else's, would increase far beyond anything approaching electability merely by her having been handed the nomination by the supers.

Again, I've made no claim that this outcome is any more likely than any other. It simply remains out there with every other possibility - some perhaps more likely than others, none a sure thing.

One other point I'd like to make:

I'm sure there are Clinton "dead-enders" - loyalists who will carry-on, no matter the facts as they develope, or the trade-offs they have to make with the good of the Democratic Party's prospects in November, or its equally-important prospects to continue forward with a degree of unity of purpose into the future. It would not suprise me if there were a few Obama suporters who fell into that category as well.

I'm a hard fighter for what I believe, but I'm not suicidal. I don't put myself in that category for ANY candidate. On 2 prior occasions, I've been prepared to call it: Texas/Ohio and Pa. Both times, Sen. Clinton prevailed, and I drew myself back into the battle.

I remain available to be convinced, but only by the facts as they develope. I think I can safely say that if Sen. Obama wins both NC and Indiana, I'll be prepared to concede. Anywhere along the route remaining where I perceive the door has closed, I'll be out. I won't like it, but I'm a realist and I'll live with it. Until then, let's play on.

You've asked an honest question and I appreciate that you're at least looking at the math, because it seems to me that many of Hillary's supporters aren't.

But look what you've done and look at the conclusion you've come to. You've drawn up what I would consider to be a mighty rosy scenario for Hillary in NC, where most of the remaining delegates are, and assumed a tie in states where Obama has distinct demographic advantages. I also noticed that in the states you didn't set at 50-50, your assumed percentages are such that if Hillary lost one percent, she'd lose a delegate.
And, even having stacked the deck for the last ten hands pretty heavily in Hillary's favor, you've hit a point where Hillary still has to convince 74% of the remaining supers to overturn the primary outcome.

As long as we're hypothesizing, let's assign some arbitrary percentages to those two events.

My sense is that the chances of the delegate race working out as favorably to Hillary as you've forecast is no more than 20%. You might say you see a 50% chance of that happening. Okay, fair enough. We'll work with both.

As to the superdelegate, part, I now have to quibble with your because you have slipped a near zero probability event into your assumptions. Specifically, you posit that the supers might chose Hillary because, among other things, Obama lost all but one of the last ten races. But, see, under your scenario he didn't lose nine races. He won one and tied three, all of which are likely Obama wins based on demographics (which have ruled this race). And, sorry, even in Hypothetical World, I just can't buy that because there's essentially 0% chance that will happen. So let's say Obama won all of those 50.1 to 49.9, a delegate, but not an electoral, tie. Fair enough?

Now, with Obama in the delegate lead and having won four of the last nine contests and three of the last four (and the last three actual states with actual electoral votes) and the majority of the states overall, I'd say the chance that Obama cannot get 111 super delegates into the bag before the convention is about 10%.

My reason for assigning this percentage is simple. Under your scenario, Hillary will not be at the convention with a clearcut electoral vote lead and would be behind in the delegate race. Instead, the best case scenario for her is that she'll be there behind in pledged delegates, behind in total delegates and with a bare argument that she's ahead in the electoral vote if you count it the way she says it should be counted, and not the way Obama says it should be counted. She'll be pointing out that Obama couldn't eat into her base, but Obama will be pointing out that she couldn't eat into his either.

Given that, I believe there is a 90% chance that at least 111 supers would think back to the interparty strife of 2000 and rightly recognize that most of Obama's supporters would interpret a Hillary nomination as a steal (a very real fact that most Hillary supporters are stubbornly ignoring). Do the supers really think African Americans and the new voters Obama's brought in are going to turn out for Hillary in the necessary numbers if that happens? And, if so, wouldn't that kill her electability in the general, which is her sole argument? Might the convention itself dissolve into the kind of chaos we saw in 1968 if Obama's delegates think we've stolen it for her? What else might happen? There will almost certainly be massive protests in the streets of cities across the country. That'll look great on the evening news, won't it? How many people who now say they would vote for Hillary would get caught up in the spirit of those protests and refuse to turn out on election day or, worse, vote for McCain?

Still, despite all thosse concerns, maybe you say my 10% is crazy and there's at least a 40% chance that that Obama can't get 111 supers before the convention.

So what are Hillary's odds of winning the nomination under your electoral scenario? I say she has a 2% chance of winning the nomination. (20% * 10% = 2%). You (the hypothetical you I'm talking to in this post, anyway) say its 20% (50% * 40% = 20%).

If I'm right, the amount of damage she's doing to the guy who has a 98% chance of being the nominee, merely by running against him and keeping him out of the states he needs to be working for November is totally unjustifiable. She should drop out now.

If you're right, and she has a one in five chance of getting the nomination, she is justified in staying in, but she is not justified in engaging in the kind of slashing attacks from the right she used in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania on the guy who has an 80% chance of being her party's nominee.

If she wants to stay in on a 1 in 5 chance, the damage caused by keeping him on the primary trail rather than the general trail is justifiable, but the slasher attacks are not. Closing with a positive campaign that makes a case for herself is okay. Heck, even attacking him from the left for having an insufficiently liberal health care plan or not being sufficiently committed to withdrawing from Iraq is okay.

Continually attacking the likely nominee from the right is not and neither is ginning up more Republican personality-based trivia coverage.

You know what I'm talking about. Hillary's people are the ones who pushed the Wright flap. Hillary's people are the ones who eagerly emailed the Bittergate nonsense to the MSM dogs and peddled it most agressively. Hillary's people are the ones who pushed the Ayers nonsense. Hillary is the one who accused Obama of being an elitist (making herself look utterly ridiculous in the process). Hillary is the one who says Obama hasn't crossed the imaginary "commander in chief" threshold with her and McCain.

And, no, it is not "fair game" because the Republicans will likely use all of this stuff (that Hillary's op team found for them) because a) Obama has to hold back against her for fear of further alienating her supporters and, b) when it comes from someone within the party, it validates the attack in the mind of the indies and swingy Dems in a way that a slasher from the wingnuts would not.

Do you guys not see that? If McCain or a Republican surrogate attacks Obama because of Wright, he can hit back with his "this is what they do because they've got no ideas except for ones that are so bad for you they dare not mention them" attack. When Hillary, however, goes after him for staying with his church, she just reinforces the perception that he's some dangerous alien who's hostile to whites.

And there's the problem, isn't it? Because Hillary isn't going to do that. She's not going to restrain herself because she's decided that Obama will lose no matter what and only she can save the party. By declaring to be on a crusade, she conveniently gives herself permission to ignore all boundaries and cross any lines. There are no limits because she must win. That's how crusades work. That's what a crusade is.

Which, in turn, is my problem with her campaign, and her supporters, at this point. Barring some 8.0 Richter scale scandal or catastrophe on the Obama side, Hillary cannot win the nomination except through means that would alienate too many of Obama's supporters for her to possibly win the general. That means her pursuit of her remaining 2 - 20 percent chance of winning the nomination is nothing more than an exercise in nihilism.

And, forgive me, but people like you are enabling her in that exercise.

Steve-

Outstanding post! As usual.

I heard Andrew Sullivan liken her to the Gollum (sic) character from 'Lord of the Rings'.