Preemptive Blather

Keith posed this quiz to guest Dana Millbank: Who said this? Hillary or a Saturday Night Live satire?: "West Virginia will be a turning point in this campaign." Millbank knew right away: it was Hillary. But it was satire anyway.

Hillary will likley win the WV primary today by a huge margin, and get in the neighborhood of 19 or 20 delegates, the numbers folk say, while Obama will win 8 or 10. She'll pick up a net of maybe 12. But in the week since North Carolina/Indiana, Obama has picked up 26 total super-delegates. And it's no longer who gets more delegates, but how many Obama accumulates. His campaign figures he's 150 away from nomination. An AP story Monday said that if he continues to win supes at that pace, he'll have the nomination by the last primary on June 3 (assuming there hasn't yet been a deal for Michigan and Florida that changes the total he needs) even if he loses 3 of the last 6 contests (including WVA.)

Obama folks are bracing for one more bad day: today. Then comes May 20, when with a win in Oregon, Obama is expected to have gained the majority of delegates available from contests--which in itself will spring Nancy Pelosi and her cache of super-delegates. I haven't seen anything recently about Puerto Rico and how close he may come to Clinton's expected plurality there, but that's the last one she's expected to win.

Even the cable news gabbers hysterically trying to fill time with blather today will be hard-pressed to change the story line. I expect a lot of their nonsense to be about the general election. But they still haven't figured out what Frank Rich wrote about Sunday: this is a different election in a different year with a very different candidate. It's been pretty different so far, but they just aren't learning very fast. I don't plan to be watching.

(By the way, Jed Report shows that two polls agree that McCain's association with Bush is more harmful to him than Obama's association with Rev. Wright etc.)

Meanwhile, after appearances in West VA and Kentucky Monday, Obama is campaigning in Missouri, Michigan and Florida (where he'll also be working towards a solution to seat their delegations) as well as Oregon this weekend.