It's Over -- Almost

Last Tuesday, your faithful blog poster headed off from St. Andrews to Northern Ireland. I spent a couple of days there and was struck by the natural beauty of the countryside; more details on Northern Ireland in a subsequent blog.

But, while there, the seemingly endless Democratic party presidential nominating process effectively came to an end. Barack Obama’s bigger than expected victory margin in North Carolina (57-43%), coupled with Hillary Clinton’s narrow (51-49%) win in Indiana effectively wrapped up the nomination for Obama. Let’s put this in sports terms that students on both sides of the Atlantic can understand. So, we will avoid, for now, baseball, cricket, or rugby – instead, let’s take basketball. Before the two primaries last Tuesday, Clinton was down ten points with two minutes to go – daunting but not insurmountable. Now, she’s down 15 with 60 seconds left on the clock.

So, while the remaining six primaries will play themselves out over the next three weeks, the Democrats have a nominee – almost. Although Clinton is likely to win overwhelmingly in West Virginia tomorrow and Kentucky next week, she’s too far behind Obama to catch him in the pledged delegate race. Meanwhile, according to the highly reliable www.realclearpolitics.com website, Obama has now edged ahead of her in the superdelegate count. Clinton’s last remaining hope rests on two slender possibilities. One, a catastrophe of major proportions hits the Obama campaign (greater, say, than the Reverend Jeremiah Wright issue of a while back). Second, her campaign will try, probably without success but you never know, to raise the nettlesome, as yet uncounted, Michigan and Florida results. Switching briefly back to sports, this time to American football, Senator Clinton needs a Hail Mary touchdown, followed by a successfully recovered on-side kick, followed by another Hail Mary score. Those are very long odds.

Meanwhile, to wrap up the blog’s pledged delegate contest associated with Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana. Remember, Obama led Clinton by 166 pledged delegates before Pennsylvania. She picked up twelve there, to cut his lead to 154 and gained an additional four from her win in Indiana. But, his landslide success in North Carolina netted him fifteen so, headed into tomorrow, his pre-Pennsylvania lead has been reduced by a grand total of one, to 165. His likely pledged delegate lead when all is said and done is likely to be in the vicinity of 135 to 140. By the way, the winner of the blog contest was Rebecca B., who came very close, predicting things would remain unchanged at 166. More soon on Northern Ireland.