Almost assuredly not. In fact, neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is likely to be even halfway to the required total of 2023 delegates by then, and the delegate difference between them on February 6th is likely to be quite small.

For the past couple of weeks I've been blogging about how, regardless of how many states Senators Clinton and Obama each "win" tonight, the Democratic primary system is not like the electoral college -- winner does not take all -- and therefore neither one of them is likely to emerge from today as a prohibitive favorite in terms of actually securing a majority of delegates. Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has now run some numbers, and he calculates that the largest possible delegate spread between the two candidates after this evening is likely to be no more than 75 delegates, and that as of tomorrow morning both candidates will need to win over 1000 more delegates for a majority -- probably more than 1100 -- with only 1428 pledged delegates remaining to be chosen in primaries and caucuses. Thus, in order to win the nomination without the aid of "superdelegates," either candidate would need to win more than three-quarters of the remaining pledged delegates, something that is virtually inconceivable.

I'm like, scratching my head. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, correct? The nomination will be awarded officially by delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the delegate selection process is over, and the majority of the delegate votes at the convention belong to people who will vote for Obama. Ergo, QED, therefore, ipso facto, a fortiori and you can take it to the bank, Senator Obama will be the nominee.

So Hillary Clinton takes the occasion to announce:

She is the candidate who will be the best president;
She is asking people to continue to donate to her campaign;
She will decide on the future of her campaign in the coming days, based on what the people who voted for her want her to do;
That the voters of South Dakota have had the last word in the primaries, even though the polls in Montana were still open at that very moment;
That more people voted for her than had ever voted for a candidate in a primary -- even though more people voted for Obama than for Hillary Clinton.

Today's Washington Post has an article that discusses "The Downside of Obama Strategy," i.e., that he actually has the audacity to believe that every Democrat's (and, perhaps, every American's) vote should count equally. The article notes (accurately) that Clinton has done better in large, electoral-vote-rich states than has Obama, which has ostensibly provoked fears about the prospects of his winning in November. It doesn't matter that he has received more popular votes than Clinton in contested elections--which allows us to omit Michigan and Florida--and, of course, that he has won more delegates. All that matters, according to a number of quoted Clinton supporters, is the vote in large states. So what we have is an attempt to apply to the nominating process the Electoral College's effective disenfranchisement of those unlucky enough to live in states where they are the political minority and the insane emphasis on a relatively few "battleground" states . One gather that Clinton will lose to Obama in today's caucuses in Wyoming. But, hey, it doesn't matter what Wyoming Democrats think, because they live in a Republican state.

Unless Barack Obama wins both Texas and Ohio (and adds Pennsylvania a couple of weeks later for good measure), the race will go on, and the controversy about counting delegates from Florida and Michigan will become ever more heated. The Clinton position that the results of the primaries held there in January, in patent defiance of the Democratic National Committee, should be honored, is preposterous. The candidates had pledged to honor the ban by not campaigning there. Obama wasn't even on the ballot in one of those states and certainly didn't campaign. But if Clinton and Obama remain more-or-less tied after the next string of primaries, there will, I suspect, be great pressure to rehold the primaries in a context where both candidates can campaign. This appears fair on the surface, but there is a real paradox in adopting this solution.

The current situation in the Democratic and Republican parties is almost entirely a function of the fact that they operate under two strikingly different election systems. It is "natural experiment" that has much to teach us about institutional design. The Democrats are operating under a classic system of proportional representation. The only real surprise is that it so quickly was reduced to a two-person contest, probably a function of the enormous amounts of money needed to finance a modern campaign. The Republicans, on the other hand, have chosen to operate, in many states, under a classic first-past-the-post winner-take-all system. This means that John McCain was able to get all of Missouri's delegates by getting, I believe, 34% of the total vote in that state. I haven't done the numbers to know what would be happening in the Democratic race if states operated on a first-past-the-post winner take all system. At the very least, Clinton would have hundreds of additional delegates from New York, New Jersey, and California, for starters, not to mention similar possibilities in Texas and Ohio, should she win either by even one vote. If Republicans had adopted a p.r. system similar to the Democrats, then John McCain would by no means have the nomination locked up, and we could all look forward to a circus at the Republican convention in Minneapolis.

The Democratic Party has just stripped Michigan of its votes at the national convention because, in violation of Party rules, Michigan is holding a primary before February 1. The Party has also done the same to Florida. Under party rules, only Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina are allowed to hold primaries before February 1.

Losing both New Hampshire and Iowa can destroy a candidacy. Winning both is a sure path to the nomination.

It appears that John McCain is the anointed (at least by the press) nominee of the Republican Party, not least becasue he carried a number of Northeastern states in which he basically stands no chance of winning in November and because he won 33% of the vote in Missouri and, apparently, 44% of the Republican vote in California. As to the former, the winner-take-all feature had been engineered to slingshot Rudy Giuliani into the lead. Obviously, things changed. (California is not winner-take-all for the Republicans.) Missouri is also a winner-take-all state, which means, by definition, that a candidate rejected by 67% of the relevant electorate can nonetheless "win" because of being first-past-the-post. Perhaps McCain might have won in a run-off or alternative transferrable vote, but there is certainly reason to doubt this in Missouri.

It increasingly looks like the super delegates will determine who will be the Democratic Party nominee for President. Some observers have suggested that this is a return to the days when party insiders--influenced by personal or special interests--called the shots in a "smoke filled room." For those who don't know, this is a reference to the selection of Warren Harding in 1920 as the Republican candidate, described briefly here (by William Leuchtenburg):

Although little public attention was paid to Ohio's Senator Warren Harding, as early as February his manager, Harry Daugherty, had predicted that the three strong candidates [General Leonard Wood, Governor Frank Lowden, and Senator Hiram Johnson] would kill one another off and that Harding would get the nod from the Old Guard leaders who would dominate the convention. After the convention deadlocked, Daugherty forecast, the winner would be chosen by a gathering of "fifteen or twenty men, somewhat weary" at "about eleven minutes after two o'clock on Friday morning."

I am sure you have all seen the headlines – the big Democratic turn out, the big Obama win, the big Clinton loss, and the religious right’s single-handed miracle of a Huckabee win – but what happened in Iowa last night holds far more secrets about what is to come than those headlines.

I caucused with the Democrats so I will have to limit my comments to what I saw there, although from my understanding, the Republicans go, pledge, pray, vote, and go again -- home to watch the Orange Bowl (Kansas was playing after all). The Democratic caucus procedure is much more involved, but more on that later.

Hillary Clinton is evidently running for the Republican nomination for president. Monday, she met with Richard Mellon Scaife -- yes, the very architect and financier of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, the man behind the Whitewater hoax, the man who spent millions of dollars promoting the story that Hillary Rodham Clinton had Vince Foster murdered -- now the publisher of a commercially non-viable far right-wing vanity newspaper, and used the occasion to denounce Barack Obama for being a member of Jermiah Wright's church.

Today, I read this in the Washington Post: "[Like John McCain] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he has taken in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care . . . ."

It's not very surprising that a recent poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain if Obama is the nominee, since it has been the Clinton strategy for several weeks now to endorse John McCain over Obama.

If there is one thing that is clear about contemporary America, it is that "democracy" scarcely describes our approach to politics. No, I'm not going to do another attack on our Constitution. Instead, I continue to be interested in the widespread belief that the Democratic primary has gone on "too long" and that something needs to be done to wrap it all up (and, in fact, that it should have been wrapped up weeks ago). As a committed Obamaite, I've not been above such thoughts, but as a slightly more detached analyst, I wonder what exactly is wrong about the current imbroglio, at least if one believes in democracy.

Consider the following: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama actually have had to visit states like Texas, Wyoming, and Mississippi, which they will certainly not do for the general election. They will also find themselves in North Carolina and South Dakota before too very long. This means, among other things, that they are actually forced to become familiar with issues that might matter to people in those states and address them as, gasp, the equal of Democrats in safe states or the fabled swing voters in the few "battleground states." I'm opposed, of course,

As many of you who regularly read my blog know, I'm not big into politics here. (It's a fascinating, but dirty business.) I've written the rare column about it, but I watched the returns on Thursday's Iowa caucuses with some interest, and I thought I'd write something about it, as the 2008 presidential campaigns got officially underway.

As you all know, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee were the winners on the Democratic and Republican sides, respectively. Obviously both candidates got a huge boost from winning the first major political contest of the 2008 presidential campaign. But I thought some pundits went a little overboard with the pronounciations they were making, especially about Obama.

There was a story in the NYT today which repeated an argument Hillary Clinton has been making for awhile -- that only she and John McCain cross the "commander in chief threshold." This argument is meant to stress her experience and readiness for the presidency, but there is a shadow issue that few have noticed although it dogged the first Clinton presidency. That's the relationship between the officer corps and the Democratic party. So far I've noticed one story on this issue in the Washington Times which gave expression to the serious doubts the military has about both Democratic candidates. The conservative and Republican tendencies of the officer corps have been noted but I'm not advancing a Seven Days in May scenario and those tendencies are inherently no more worrisome that the liberal and Democratic tendencies of law professors. The issue is rather whether the gulf between most of the officer corps and Democrats has reached the point where alienation, lack of common ground, and mistrust would lead to unnecessary conflict, misunderstandings, and serious policy mistakes in a Clinton or Obama administration. Remember the opening months of the first Clinton administration -- gays in the military? That conflict featured the military brass drawing on their contacts in Congress to oppose an initiative featured in the presidential election.

A Wall Street Journal columnist today suggests that “Obama’s ‘Identity’ Beat Hillary’s ‘Identity.’” His argument is that the Democratic party is dominated by identity politics, and Senator Clinton lost because the race card beat the sex card.

The columnist claims, furthermore, that Obama (influenced by legal theorists at Harvard) sees matters in terms of identity politics, regardless of his professed desire to move beyond it. The columnist writes:
After South Carolina, the campaigns accused each other of playing the race or gender card. Obama deflected this charge. "I don't want to deny the role of race and gender in our society," Obama said. "They're there, and they're powerful. But I don't think it's productive."

I'm not convinced. I think Barack Obama is more inclined to interpret American life in the formal categories of identity politics than is generally thought, or even than would older "conventional liberals" like Al Gore or John Kerry. Legal theorists have been a main source of its ideas; it's hard to imagine that Barack and Michelle Obama didn't hear a lot about "marginalized constituencies" at Harvard Law School. Sen. Obama may not be so conventional after all.

Needless to say, many pundits are now commenting on the rules of the Democratic Party re the selection of its presidential candidate. See, e.g., E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post, where he writes that "Democrats have contrived a nominating contest that even Rube Goldberg would have considered too convoluted, too dysfunctional and too improbable to name as his own." Save for the certainly peculiar way by which Texas names its delegates--I had the pleasure of voting twice for Barack Obama, once in early voting (in a secret ballot) and then several days later at my local caucus (which is definitely not secret)--I don't share the hostility to a preference-sensitive proportional representation system that does not negate the votes of everyone who doesn't vote for "the winner" (who may, as with McCain in a number of states, get distinctly less than a majority of the vote). But I've already made such arguments, and I won't rehearse them again. My current grumpiness is about something else, though regular readings of Balkinization shouldn't be surprised by what I'm about to write.

Last July, I published a piece in the Boston Globe, entitled "No Vice," arguing that we would be better off either without a Vice President at all--we got along without one for 45 of our first 180 years)--or, perhaps more plausibly, waiting until after the election and having the winner, a la the 25th Amendment, nominate a vice president, subject to congressional confirmation. I would, incidentally, also allow the President or Congress to fire the Vice President, but that's another matter for another thread.

I can't help but wonder if John McCain might not find some real merit in the suggestion. Consider his dilemma. It is clear that Mike Huckabee isn't going to be the nominee for president, but his followers might (legitimately?) feel dissed if he isn't chosen for Veep. At best, they might stay home; at worst, they might vote for Obama and actually put some of the Red States in play, especially if Obama chooses, say, James Webb or Wesley Clark as his Veep. On the other hand,

Hillary Clinton (pictured wearing the hat of her "favorite" MLB team) is expected to announce on Saturday that she is giving up her Democratic presidential ambition and will support expected nominee Barack Obama. (Not a surprise she is waiting until Saturday, as today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

I would bet that she will NOT be Obama's choice to be his vice presidential running mate, as the Obamas don't want the baggage that comes with her (aka Bill), and she doesn't want to be vice president anyway. (Obama needs a running mate who appeals to the two most important groups he still needs to win over from John McCain: Independents and Conservative Democrats. That's not Hillary.) I would bet in the long run she's hoping that Obama loses in November so she could run again in 2012.

I don't want to distract our readers from the very important story about the Administration's stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission -- read about the New York Times's essential story and the Zelikow Report here -- but this is very much worth your attention, too:

Continuing his invaluable work, Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe today publishes responses of nine presidential candidates to a series of questions he posed about the topics that have dominated this blog since 2004. I'll add some highlights here shortly -- in the meantime, go read the responses.

QUESTION: Since I have been pregnant my husband and I have made a concerted effort to eat and drink organic foods and drinks. The first thing we switched to was organic milk. I noticed right away that the organic milk had a longer shelf-life than regular milk did but couldn't figure out why. Well today I found the answer:

Without endorsing either of the three Presidential candidates in the US, and without suggesting any underhanded shenanigans, let me propose a thought about USA '08.

It occurred to me last week while having drinks with a dozen or so industry peers - almost all democrats, mind you. The subject of the conversation somehow shifted to politics and the candidates... and I fully expected the group to be happy about Sen. Obama's advantage over Sen. Clinton. That, however, wasn't the case: No one at the table endorsed Obama.

As the nation gears up to see what N.H. has in store for us, I couldn't help but try to pull some attention back to Iowa. Although I gave you a taste of what the caucus was like from my relatively juvenile point of view, I thought my parents would provide an interesting take on the caucus that often isn’t available in the blogosphere (my parents are decidedly not bloggers). Since they are semi-retired, I was able to rope them in. Their thoughts are below:

Thoughts from my dad:
"I’ve always been an independent—although most often voting Republican rather than Democrat—so spent a lot of time reading about and listening to the candidates from both parties. With growing concern about Iraq and Pakistan and many foreign/energy relations issues, I joined my wife and daughters in supporting the Democrats—making that decision in the last 1-2 weeks.

Jeffrey K. Tulis

Whether Senator Obama has a well worked out domestic policy agenda and a detailed understanding of foreign policy is a lingering concern of democrats who find his inspirational rhetoric short on specific analyses, proposals, and plans. This concern has provided occasion for Senator Clinton and others to revive Walter Mondale’s famous question to Gary Hart, taken from a then popular TV commercial for a hamburger, “where’s the beef?” Obama may be tempted respond to the question by offering detailed counter-proposals to Senator Clinton’s plans for health care, immigration, the economy, campaign finance and any other issue she chooses to highlight. This would be a mistake both as tactical choice in the primaries, and in light of his impressive understanding of the place of the presidency in the constitutional order.

Apologies to my hordes of disappointed readers for the lacuna. My Intertubes were blocked on Tuesday -- or, to put it in less technical terms, our ISP had an all-day, city-wide outage. I had the chance to post from elsewhere in the evening but I said to heck with it. Yesterday, the problem was in the wetware. I think I was just so depressed and disgusted by the completely idiotic and repulsive coverage of politics on TV that my neural circuits were sputtering fecklessly. The link is to Glenn Greenwald, writing coherently.

Anyhow, both the ISP and I have rebooted, so before I do a public health post later today, let me just put in my two cents on the presidential campaign. Nothing terribly original, just the same open letter to Hillary Clinton I know you would write as well.

Dear Senator Clinton: You have already made history as the first woman to run a truly credible campaign for the presidency. You have staked out substantive positions on many issues, and your campaign has simultaneously transcended gender and championed gender equality. Good for you. The next woman to run for president will find the way smoothed by your precedent. Chris Matthews has been chastened (to some extent) and it won't be a novelty, it will just be a presidential campaign.

Yes, another political post. Tomorrow is the Super Tuesday to end all Super Tuesdays, so I don't feel too bad about it. For a political junkie, this has been the most fascinating 6 weeks I've ever seen. Results wildly out of line with the polls, huge lead changes, the death of "momentum" as a meaningful gauge of a candidate's chances, debates more wonkish than I've ever seen, and two candidates I'm super enthusiastic about...

And that's just on the Democratic side. With the Republicans we've got Giuliani's 50 million dollar delegate, Huckabee's shock win in Iowa and all-too-predictable collapse, Romney remembering too late that he had a far better case as a smart business guy than he ever did as the cultural warrior, and the resurgence of McCain (which I'm not enthusiastic about in a strategic sense, but which does make me feel smart for predicting that he would win the nomination way back in November when he looked DOA).

Anyways, I got an e-mail today from a friend in California leaning toward Hillary asking me to make the case for Obama. I ended up with a fairly lengthy response and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. Yesterday I made the emotional case. This is the strategic one:

Over at the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson gets what is at stake in the 2008 election-- a reconstructive presidency:

Obama's candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton's legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal.

That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult. The Clintons picked up on this slight well before Obama made it explicit with his observation that Ronald Reagan had "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."

SuperTuesday is fast approaching, the closest thing to a national primary we'll likely ever see. It's time to lay down a marker for what we expect from election administrators on Tuesday. No polling place -- not one -- should run out of ballots on Tuesday.

This week history was made with Obama winning the Democratic party's nomination!

I love this video of Chris Rock's views on the 2008 Election: Chris Rock's 2008 Election Analysis

Hilary's speech was very interesting. Click here