After Senator Clinton's strong victories yesterday, she has pulled to within 100 delegates of Senator Obama. Clearly, neither candidate will have a majority of the delegates before the convention and thus the superdelegates will ultimately decide the matter. While Senator Obama will almost certainly have more delegates than Senator Clinton, should she win the Pennsylvania primary next month, she will very likely be in a position of having received more primary votes than Obama. Conversely, if Obama wins PA, he'll have more delegates and more votes. In either case, the PA winner should be our nominee.
If Senator Obama had won either Ohio or Texas, he would be our all-but-certain nominee today. But Senator Clinton's wins yesterday (including a decisive win in RI) has fundamentally changed the dynamic of the race. Not only did Clinton win Ohio and Texas, but she did far better than the polls had predicted. Indeed, her Ohio victory was nearly a landslide. With only Pennsylvania left among the major states, Clinton has won nearly every one of them (with the exception of Obama's own Illinois). And while some of these large states, like CA and NY will go for the Democrat no matter who we nominate, others like Ohio and, perhaps, New Jersey could very well be contested in November. No one doubts, of course, that Pennsylvania will also be seriously contested.
If Senator Obama loses Pennsylvania, he may still have more delegates than Senator Clinton but he'll very likely have fewer popular votes. This is particularly so if we were to also count in the Florida vote which Clinton won handily but, of course, received no delegates. (I'll leave Michigan out of the equation because, well, it was such a nonsensical mess.) Now the plain fact is that we are both the Democratic and a democratic party. How can we call ourselves a democratic party if we were to nominate a candidate who received fewer primary votes than his or her opponent?
The answer for Obama is simple - just win Pennsylvania. If he wins PA, there will be no argument, no questions of legitimacy or democracy, because he'll then have won both the popular vote and a plurality of the delegates. Pennsylvania is a perfect microcosm of the country with its mix of urban, suburban, rural, agriculture, industry, labor and high-tech. It also is representative of the country's racial, religious and ethnic diversity. Whoever wins this state surely has a claim to being the stronger candidate in November. And, having thus also won the popular vote in the primaries, the winner of the Pennsylvania primary should be our party's nominee.