Obama Hits Clinton Campaign's "Lunacy"

"The Rumble and the Fumble" continues for the two Dem candidates for president with the charges and counter-charges getting more interesting by the moment. In light of last night's blowouts by Obama in Wisconsin and Hawaii, the Obama campaign is doing its best to suggest that Hillary is out of it and can't possibly catch up:

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe argued to reporters Wednesday that the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign has virtually no hope of moving ahead in the delegate count after the climactic Texan and Ohio primaries two weeks from now.

“This is a wide, wide lead right now,” Plouffe said on a conference call following Sen. Barack Obama’s blowout win in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.

“I am amused when he Clinton campaign continues to say: 'Well, it’s essentially a tie.' I mean, that’s just lunacy. We have opened up a big and meaningful pledged delegate lead. They are going to have to win landslides from here on out to erase it.”...

The Clinton campaign on Wednesday opened a new website, The Delegate Hub, to push its case about delegate counting.

Plouffe said Clinton aides “keep offering alternative theories for why they can win the nomination that have nothing to do with the votes that are happening in these contests.”

“Now, when they don’t like the delegate math they rewrite the rules — and I gotta tell you, voters are tired of that,” he added.

“In order for them to begin to really erode the pledged delegate lead, they probably need to win both of these states by well over 20 points,” Plouffe said.

“We would encourage you all to ask the Clinton campaign in great detail, state by state, how they would intend to erase this pledged delegate lead... ."

You can pretty much smell the desperation now in the Clinton campaign. The very fact they had to open The Delegate Hub confirms that. You really ought to take a look at the site - they're working pretty hard to convince all of us that she still has a chance. Just look at the opening paragraph on the site:

As more voters make their choice for the Democratic nomination, there is growing interest in the facts and myths about the race to reach 2208 delegate votes - the number required for a candidate to secure the nomination with Florida and Michigan included. The Obama campaign is claiming, without precedent or justification, that automatic delegates (commonly referred to as "super delegates") should switch to Sen. Obama en masse based on arbitrary metrics, with the aim of tilting the delegate balance in his favor. The fact is: no automatic delegate is required to cast a vote on the basis of anything other than his or her best judgment about who is the most qualified to be president.

Note a couple of interesting things:

1. The Clinton campaign is including Michigan and Florida delegates who have been banned from being seated due to violations of DNC rules. It's pretty clear that she's going to try and snag those delegates even though the DNC voted to bar them (including her campaign aide Harold Ickes) and the fact that Obama's name didn't even appear on the Michigan ballot. How's that going to sit with Obama supporters?
2. Because of the inclusion of Michigan and Florida, the Clinton campaign has actually changed the number of delegates needed to win, from the 2,025 that has been reported all along, to 2,208. That's the first time that number has appeared anywhere.
3. They've also cleverly changed the name from "superdelegates" to "automatic delegates". They're trying to convince Democrats that the superdelegates are not party bigwhigs, but just a bunch of regular folks whose votes are no different than anybody elses. Nice try.

I may have to make plans to go to Denver in time for the Democratic Convention. I've never seen an actual war before.

UPDATE: Obama beat Clinton in nearly every group in the exit polls, but Rush Limbaugh did find one where Clinton triumphed:

"According to the Wisconsin exit poll data, Hillary Clinton did do well with one group: the second generation transgender amputees."

She'll take every victory she can get right now.