I suspect that as the remaining super delegates trickle toward Obama today that the new services will follow suit and begin calling Barack Obama the winner of the 2008 Democratic primary.

• The Associated Press calls it for Obama at 1:28 CDT today.
• NBC calls for Obama at 3:00 CDT today.
• ABC calls it at 5:30 CDT today.

As of 1:53 CDT, MSNBC still puts Obama 27.5 delegates short of the 2,118 but the AP count is based 15 delegates who committed to Obama with the Associate Press and on and the number of delegates Obama will pick up if he wins at least 30% of the vote in Montana and South Dakota.

Maybe a little premature put it certainly puts more pressure on HRC to call make some kind of announcement tonight when the polls close.

Barack Obama is 39.5 delegates short of the 2,118 delegates (now) needed to secure the Democratic nomination for president.

Hillary Clinton is 198 delegates short of 2,118, which means she needs about 84% of the 235.5 remaining pledged and super delegates to be nominated.

NBC reports that approximately 18 remaining super delegates in the Senate and at least 34 members of the House of Representatives are now ready to endorse Obama. With Obama set to win about 17 delegates in Montana and South Carolina tomorrow, this would easily put him over the top.

More importantly, it would appear that the reality of the mathematics of the delegate count has finally gotten through to the Clinton campaign. By all reports, Hillary Clinton certainly seems to be on verge of suspending her campaign and while she could technically take her case for the nomination to the Denver convention, the impending super delegate rush tomorrow and on Wednesday is going to make that unlikely.

The best news for Obama is that when these 50 or so super delegates are combined with the Montana and South Dakota results tomorrow, HRC’s only remaining arguments for getting the nomination become moot, particularly among Democratic party leaders.

The postmortem among media pundits and the incriminations within the Clinton campaign will start sometime on Wednesday morning but I’m going to jump ahead and suggest at least three factors right now:

• Overestimating the importance of New Hampshire: While New Hampshire was technically a draw, Clinton won the popular vote and was able to claim victory in what has traditionally been the most important primary for both parties. In the past, winning New Hampshire has been critical to securing the nomination, the exceptions being Republicans John McCain in 2000 and Pat Buchanan in 1996 and Democrats Estes Kefauver in 1952 and 1956 and Paul Tsongas in 1992. With the addition of an additional caucus (Nevada) and primary (South Carolina) state in 2008, both Iowa and New Hampshire became less significant to gaining or losing momentum in the campaign.
• Underestimating the power of a movement: The Clinton campaign has pointed out (correctly) on numerous occasions that it has been out-spent by the Obama campaign. But what they fail to mention is that Obama was able to spend more because his campaign was able to raise more money from more people in smaller donations. I’m pretty certain that more than a few books or dissertations are going to be written about the tactical brilliance of the Obama campaign but it’s real beauty was in not being taken seriously by the Clinton campaign until it was too late.
• Almost-weekly movement of the goalposts: In spite of the fact that the Democratic party set some clear criteria for winning the nomination (like winning 2,025 delegates) nobody in the Clinton campaign seemed to take them seriously and was constantly presenting new reasons why HRC should be declared the party’s nominee. I think this began with Bill Clinton’s assertion that “even Jesse Jackson won South Carolina” when Democrats in that state rejected the Clintons in favor of Obama. It continued with Hillary and her surrogates continuing to argue that HRC had won the popular vote (in selected states) and that’s what matters and that the votes of people who vote in caucus states don’t matter as much as those of voters in Florida and Michigan. These appeals were directed toward super delegates but I think they ended up insulting the intelligence of most other voters.

I’m sure there are at least 1-2 other factors I haven’t considered but I’m sure you’ll let me know what they are before Wednesday.

At a meeting today with the editorial board of the Argus Leader today in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (somewhat paraphrased; watch the video for context):

People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa… It is unprecedented in history…

My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.

And later today in a Brandon, South Dakota grocery store:

Earlier today, I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Sen. Kennedy waged in California in June in 1992 and 1968, and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nominating primary contests that go into June. That’s an historic fact.

The Kennedys have been much on my mind in the last days because of Sen. [Edward] Kennedy, and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.

I’m going to give Mrs. Clinton the benefit of the doubt and assume that she was not expressing a desire that something bad happen to Barack Obama before the convention in August.

But it was a pretty ham-handed comment from somebody who is an astute politician.

Personally, I found the strangest part of HRC’s comments to be her assertion that “people have been trying to push me out of this since Iowa”.

Of course they’ve been trying to “push her out”… we do elections in this country, not coronations.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. - Gerald Ford

Of course, he was talking about Watergate and not the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary.

It may not amount to anything but sources inside the Clinton campaign have told CNN that they are in private negotiations with Barack Obama’s staff and are “pushing for a ‘graceful exit strategy’ that would allow the Clinton and Obama camps to come together, and for the New York senator to save face should she fail to become the nominee”.

The sticking point seems to be whether or not Obama offers HRC the vice-presidency.

Both campaigns deny that there are any discussions underway but then again, they may just be playing “chicken” with each other.

Because that’s the way these kind of things are done.

Barack Obama inched closer to the Democratic nomination last night despite a thumping in Kentucky and a predicted win in Oregon.

In his victory speech from Iowa last night, Obama offered praised to both Hillary Clinton and her supporters for their effort to seat a Democrat in the White House.  Obama is going to need both if he wants to win the White House in November.

Naturally, there will be even more attention focused on when Clinton will suspend her campaign and who Barack Obama will select for vice-president in the coming weeks.

I’ve suspected for some time that Obama’s VP nominee will have to be somebody who is a more established political leader (i.e., “older) than Obama with impeccable foreign policy credentials who is not named Hillary Clinton.   I’m now leaning toward Joe Biden (DE), Wesley Clark or Jim Webb (VA).

I don’t see HRC giving up her Senate seat to run for vice-president in 2008 but Obama faces the same problem as every nominee selected in a close race faces: he has to at least offer a place on the ticket to the runner-up.

In the case of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the offer of the vice-presidency to then-Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson backfired when LBJ unexpectedly accepted the offer.  The Kennedys assumed that the offer was a formality and nobody as powerful as Johnson who give that up to be second bananna.

James Andrew Miller of the WaPo offers an interesting solution to the “what about Hillary?” problem for the Obama campaign: offer her the next vacancy on the US Supreme Court.

I think this would have to be done rather stealthily — Hillary has already raised more money for the RNC over the years than most Republicans.  If HRC were publicly touted for a seat on the Court, more than a few conservative heads would explode.

But it’s a good idea and would go a long way toward shoring-up support for an Obama-______________ ticket in the Democratic base.

The latest Rasmussen poll:

• McCain 39, Clinton 53, Und. 8 (Clinton +14.0)
• McCain 57, Obama 33, Und. 10 (McCain +24.0)

Wow.  A 38-point swing.

And I was kinda hoping to see Obama in the state sometime during the general election.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker was just asked by the crew on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “What was Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake?”

Hertzberg’s (tongue in cheek) response: She moved to the wrong state. If she had moved to Illinois instead of New York, she would be the state’s senior senator and not Barack Obama.

Hindsight and clairvoyance can both be 20-20.

I started to just ignore this primary but that would be unfair to the other 45 states that have been part of what seems to be the longest electoral event in my lifetime.

Hillary Clinton will win about 65% of the vote in West Virginia today but it will hardly matter to the final outcome in the Democratic nomination.  Clinton will win 18-19 of the delegates tonight and close the gap with Barack Obama by about 10 delegates.

But I suspect that the Obama campaign has already lined up 10-12 superdelegates to announce their support for him this week in order to offset any gains HRC makes in West Virginia today.

Real Clear Politics puts the current delegate count at 1872-1698 for Obama and show that he now leads in every statistical category.

My theory is that HRC is playing out the clock the way football teams do when they down 64-0 with one minute to go or just because Clintons never quit.  It’s obvious from the less confrontation tone of her stump speeches that she knows it’s over.

This is either good news or bad news, depending on how you feel about economists:

When asked if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

Robert Reich, a former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary, concluded on his blog that HRC’s response to the question about the gas tax holiday gimmick is economically stupid (not really an economic term) and highly unlikely to become law anyway, given the fact that neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain are president.

But the fact that HRC has gone on record that she doesn’t trust economists certainly places her in a bind.  At some point, a president usually finds some good news from economists to crow about.

That’s hard to do if you’ve already told everyone that you don’t trust them.

I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. - Hillary Clinton