Let's assume arguendo that the CNN report is true and that the Clinton camp has essentially offered to drop out of the campaign and given three options to the Obama campaign.  According to the reports, the options were

1. Make Hillary the VP choice

2. Publicly offer Hillary the VP choice, which she will turn down (as negotiated)

3. Try to help her pay down some of her campaign debt.

Of course, there is a fourth option: say no.  That's where the BATNA comes in.

I finally got around to cracking open Barbara Tuchman's 1985 book The March  to Folly: from Troy to Vietnam.  It's a sort of case study of why governments so often engage in policies that are not only "wrong" but foolish, and against even the self-interests of their countries.  In the very first chapter, I started seeing lines that had not just a little resonance today.

Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function [in government]?

If I get to the answer by the end of the book, I promise to share, because at that point, I'm at a loss, so I should be in for a good read, especially as I very much enjoyed Tuchman's The Guns of August.  In any case, the next couple of pages defined that sort of governmental folly, and that's where it struck home:

Electing John McCain would be literally elevating the Iraq War to "folly."

On a forum with some friends, I give periodic rundowns on the state of the race to explain ... well, up until a week ago... why the media has been operating under a mass delusion that Clinton still had a reasonable chance to win.

Hit a new point today ... even with Michigan and Florida counting in full, Obama still wins the nomination by the end of the primary season.

Behold...

I heard some commentator say last night that although Obama has a "slim lead," the rules of the Democratic Nomination Process will prevent her from making a big pickup.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.  The rules of the process are the same now and going forward as they were when Obama built his lead.  There's only one rational takeaway: if these "big wins" Senator Clinton get can't overcome the lead -- or even make a dent in it, it's not that slim, is it?

It's just an optical illusion.

First, I'd like to give you a bonus quiz, for those who didn't watch MSNBC last night.  Pat Buchanan and Rachel Maddow were having a little back-and forth over what Obama/Hillary means in terms of Obama's chances versus McCain in November.  Maddow said:

There is no connection between the inability to beat Hillary Clinton and whether or not you can beat John McCain... two totally different kinds of elections.

How did Buchanan respond?  Answer at the end.

Let's take a look at where we sit today.  It looks like Clinton netted about 10 delegates last night, 84-74 though this could move a couple as the results finalize.  I'm using DemConWatch for all my numbers here.

This takes the pledged delegate count to 1490-1337.  Committed superdelegates sit at 231-255.  This leaves 307 superdelegates outstanding, of which 62 are add-ons.

Yesterday, in a conversation about the Gallup tracking, I posted this (with my subsequent correction):

I've been playing along with the Gallup Numbers at home trying to guess the dailies behind the 3-day rolling.  Here's my best guess

Apr: O-C

13. 51-40

14. 50-42

15. 50-43

16. 48-42 (debate in pm)

17. 44-48

18. 44-47

19. 52-40

20. 50-40

Now, this has a MoE of infinity, but the numbers do add up, and it makes sense: Things were pretty stable until the debate, then Obama took a 2-day hit, recovering by the weekend.  If we see something like 50-40 tomorrow, it'll suggest this is right.

Polls are here:

http://www.latimes.com/...

conducted April 10-14 (Thursday through Monday).

Indiana: Obama +5
North Carolina: Obama +13
Pennsylvania: Clinton +5

This is a reversal of the recent polling showing Clinton with a lead in Indiana, but the amount of that lead ranging anywhere from 3 to 16 points.  The NC lead is small, but near the overlapping MoEs of the established polls, most of which have him up 18-20.  The Pennsylvania list is long, so I've just included all the pollsters' most recent outputs below.

Two new PA primary polls out this morning.  The first is Strategic Vision, which 5 days ago released a poll showing Clinton up 8, now shows Clinton up 5, which is in line with yesterday's Quinnipiac and Rasmussen results.

Come on.  You know better than this.

The reason the surge has been successful is partly because of the increase of our troops, who are superb, but also because Muqtada al-Sadr declared a truce, and because, as you said yourself to John McCain, the Sunnis decided they were better off working with the Americans.  That is not an equasion for long-term success in Iraq.

That was Senator Kerry on Fox News Sunday.  You can see that here at the 4:50 mark.

The truth of 90% of what you said pales in comparison because you perpetuated the false GOP narrative that "the surge has been successful."

Stop that!

Popular Vote.  Big states.  Electoral total.  Undemocratic.  Disenfranchise.

Meaningless.

The Clinton campaign, in a very clever and well-crafted piece of argument, is pushing a lot of those ideas to keep her campaign afloat in the face of great odds against her, with the expectation that the MSM will never call her on the essential fault of the whole series of arguments:

The primary season is not an election.

This diary isn't for most of you.  If you've committed to supporting whichever Democrat wins the nominee, you can consider your work here done.  Go have a cold one.  This is for the people who say things like:

If ~~~~~~~~~ isn't the nominee, I'm voting for McCain.  ^^^^^^^^^ would be an utter disaster, and I'm going to stop h[im|er] at all costs.

If you're planning on voting John McCain at this point, you're just not paying attention.

Thanks to markthshark for his excellent diary today regarding the White House email system and their claims that they couldn't restore the data.

Fortunately, I happen to have a little technical expertise on this matter.  I spent about 5 years doing support, administration, and design for one of the biggest Lotus Domino installations in the world.  (Domino is the name of the other "half" of Notes.  It runs on the servers, and Notes is the client that runs on users' workstations.)

The installation is part of the banking industry, which thanks to regulations like Sarbanes/Oxley and typical litigation support and internal investagatory work, has to regularly do retrieval and searching of archived data from previous years.

In my expert opinion, the White House is misrepresenting almost everything about this situation.

I'm not the only one missing the inherent cynicism of a couple of the ideas being pushed by the Clinton campaign yesterday, but it just struck me that there's a third idea they've been pushing as well that really drives the whole thing into a vortex of circular logic.

Follow along, if you dare...

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a diary called Amoral Strategy and AA Turnout that was more-than-typically ignored.  One of the few commenters called it "facile and foolish."

But the more I think about it and the more events unfold, I think I was originally on to something: The Clinton campaign is using strategies that would harm her support among African-American voters but increase it among other, larger demographics and I don't think this is accidental.

And in terms of game theory, if she can keep the damage localized, this is a good tactic in terms of winning in the short-term.

I'm going to take a detour from the numbers and charts and figures of my recent diaries today and talk about change.  Change is a word that's been uttered innumerous times over the course of the primary: "real change," "bringing about change," "change versus experience," "voting for change."  As with any theme, there's been a backlash from those who end up getting less of the benefit.  They assert that it's an empty paean, used to incite emotions but devoid of substance.

That assertion is, in a word, false, but I find it hard to blame the speakers in most cases.  What "change" represents in the candidacy of Barack Obama has been outlined by him in his writing, in his speeches, and in his legislative record, but it's seldom explained in detail.  And for that, the ignorance may be excused.

Let's stop excusing or mocking the ignorance and instead start using it as an opportunity to educate.  What Senator Obama means by "change" in a political sense is one of the most striking and appealing features of his candidacy and one of the starkest differentiators of him versus the other candidates.

That's the path to victory for Hillary Clinton, right?  She's going to win Pennsylvania big, then use that as a springboard to sweep all the remaining contests, some by surprising margins, and that will get her close enough that she can make the argument that she's the more electable candidate, and the Superdelegates will vote for her in big numbers, securing her nomination.

How many?  Well, if she wins PA 2:1 and gets big wins everywhere, she needs 55% of the total outstanding Superdelegates.  If she does as well or better than she polls everywhere now, but doesn't do anything stunning, she needs over 65% of the Superdelegates.  Hillary is the Superdelegate candidate, they love her.  She can convince them.

But... ah.  Isn't there always a "but"?

So, how does Hillary win?  To the delegate counter!  I'm working off the Forbes delegate tool here, so your mileage may vary a bit.  It has (after me completing Mississippi for it) Obama up in pledged delegates 1397-1237.

Surprisingly, with one glaring exception (Alabama) the delegate percentage and popular vote share for each candidate in the two-person contests has stayed remarkably close to even, with spillover evenly on both sides, so I'm not going to bother with deep district-level analysis for this.

I'm going to try to be as realistic as possible while giving any subjective range to Clinton.  This includes not giving him any gain over time, which he's done everywhere.

Last Friday, in the wake of the SUSA 50-state head-to-head polls, Clambake posted an almost-totally ignored diary called Fun with Numbers - General Election that posed a pretty basic question:

I decided to test some of the conventional wisdom regarding the effect of a Clinton nomination seen to be somehow less than legitimate or satisfying.  My assumption was that this would have a horrible influence on African American turnout for the general election, and would cause defections among non-African Americans to McCain.

Following the SUSA numbers, even working with a somewhat more realistic voting split, I agreed with Clambake on his bottom line: depressing AA turnout across the board by 3% cost Clinton Pennsylvania (and thus the hypothetical election) but there was no other consequence until over 25% AA depression.

I found it interesting, and decided to focus on the sunnier question of what an increase in AA voting would mean for Obama, but given the events of the past week, I think Clambake's scenario, while gloomier and less interesting from a playing-with-numbers standpoint, is much more important to the primary.