What follows is a plan which 1) could plausibly secure the nomination for Hillary and 2) wouldn't seriously injure Obama's chances in the general election if the plan fails (since the attacks against Obama end in late spring). The point of the plan is that there are still ways for Hillary to secure the nomination and that she's not being irresponsible in pursuing them. Moreover, because the plan goes through the popular vote it doesn't rely on the sorts of back-room deals which would alienate Obama supporters.
[Edit to fix photo]
Step One: Attack. Hard.
Hillary needs to keep up the level of attacks that she's been going with. A lot of people have been saying that her attacks aren't doing anything to Obama or that they aren't enough. But take a look at the graph below. (Data from Rasmussen) Since mid-February there are only two big points on the graph where Obama's unfavorable ratings exceed his favorable ratings. The first starts near 3/13, when the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke. The other starts around 4/11 when Obama's bitter comments came to light.
That graph shows that everything Obama supporters are worried about is true. That Obama can be hurt. That his campaign has gotten consistently weaker since early March and that a lot of his strength now is riding on what he did more than two months ago.
This is also where we can help. We need to do two things. First, we need to get Hillary the money she needs to keep up the attack. Right now Obama is outspending us by pretty huge margins, and yet our attacks are doing way more damage to him than his are doing to us. That means that a dollar given by a Hillary supporter can actually make a lot difference - far more than a dollar given by a given Obama supporter.
Second, we need to keep up the attack in areas where Obama is vulnerable. This means hitting that gun-questionnaire over and over again. There are YouTube videos of Obama lying on camera that we need to push. There are also PDF files of the actual questionnaires with Obama's handwriting. We need to push these to everyone we can, especially starting this Wednesday so that Hillary can be strong going into Indiana and North Carolina. Both Indiana and North Carolina are full of gun-owners, and there's no way that focusing on this issue in those states can do anything but help Hillary on May 6th. So if you know people in those states, make sure they've seen the videos and the documents. If you live in those states, make sure everyone you know sees them.
Third, we need to send the message to Hillary that we believe in her and that we support what she's doing. We need to encourage her to stay in the race all the way to the convention. Part of this is accomplished by sending money, but things as simple as a letter of support to her campaign saying that we believe in her can really go a long way. (Anyone interested in starting a letter-writing campaign should PM me). Remember, a lot of this is game goes on in the candidate's head - we have to keep her confidant and let her know that, no matter how much people attack her, we'll support her.
IMPACT OF STEP ONE:
If we're aggressive and if we keep at it, our attacks should have two impacts:
First, and importantly we're going to push Hillary into the lead in the popular vote. This is well within the realm of possibility. I'll explain how this impacts in the section on step two.
Second, we're going to bring Obama's general election weaknesses to forefront of the minds of super-delegates. This by itself probably won't convince super-delegates who have sided with Obama to support Hillary but it'll give them an important nudge to start thinking about their decision again. Once we've got them thinking about it again, we'll use step two to win them over.
Step Two: Summer Media Blitz
Starting June 3rd and going all the way to the convention, we execute step two. We push really hard on the idea that the popular vote including Florida and Michigan represents the will of the people. We claim that super-delegates are obligated to ratify that will and endorse the popular vote leader. We claim Obama's pledged delegate lead is the product of archaic and undemocratic primary rules. We take a page out of the Obama camp's play-book and we claim that if the super-delegates don't endorse the popular vote they're stealing the election from the people. We threaten a backlash (even if we're not serious if they don't comply).
There's no way that the Obama camp can win a "popular vote vs. pledged-delegate" fight in the media. The distribution of pledged delegates is based on a system which has hugely undemocratic features, many of which haven't been highlighted in the media (because it hasn't been relevant yet). For example, the pledged delegate count prizes more highly the votes of people in areas that traditionally vote democratic in heavy numbers (violating the principle of one person, one vote). It also give hugely disproportionate weight to people voting in caucuses (for example, Obama carried Idaho by a mere 2,000 votes but picked up 2 delegates. Hillary carried California by 400,000 votes but only picked up roughly 40 delegates. That means that someone in Idaho gets 10 times the voice of someone in California!). It's possible for the pledged delegate count to award more delegates to the candidate who loses a state than the candidate who wins it. For example, Hillary won Texas by 100,000 votes, but Obama picked up 6 delegates there. If Hillary picked up as many delegates per person in Texas as Obama picked up in Idaho, she would have picked up 50 delegates just in that margin. So a lot of Obama's lead is actually the product of odd rules which have almost nothing to do with democratic will. Again, there's no way they're going to win that fight in the media.
So in step two our battle-cry needs to be "Stolen Election! Undemocratic! Will of the people!" And it's going to be important for us as individuals to make these arguments and to see the second step through. We're going to need to keep up our donations to help Hillary have a competitive voice in the media over the summer and we're going to need to be spreading our message on forums like this.
IMPACT OF STEP TWO:
These steps will do a couple of things:
First, we take back the narrative that the Obama people have been beating us over the head with since February. We not only take away their ability to use that (hugely powerful) argument for their guy, but we turn it to our own ends.
Second, we make it nearly impossible for super-delegates to stay with Obama. They'll already be nervous about Obama from step one, and this will give them all the excuse they need to line up behind Hillary. Remember, we're the party that had our popular mandate stolen from us in 2000. There's no way that the super-delegates want to be this year's O'Conner in Bush v Gore.
Third, we open up Obama's pledged delegates to targeting. The Obama people will probably insist here that those pledged delegates are really loyal and unlikely to switch sides. For the most part they're right, but we have a new kind of "delegate math" that favors us here. If we take a pledged delegate from Obama and give it to Hillary, we drop Obama's tally by one and raise our own by one: a movement of two. That's twice as efficient as winning delegates in elections. In fact, if we can get just 5% of Obama's delegates to switch (roughly 75 out of about 1500), we instantly wipe out Obama's pledged-delegate lead. And just like super-delegates, pledged-delegates aren't going to want to override the will of the people.
Finally, and really importantly, step two shows us that the "delegate math" argument being used by the Obama camp is simply wrong. They're right that we can't catch up in pledged delegates by the end of the primaries, but nothing about that means that we can't secure the popular support to win the nomination. If we push step two all the way through we can wipe out the single metric used by the Obama people to comfort themselves with the idea that Hillary can't win. We turn this whole game upside down.
Conclusion:
What all of this shows is that it's still entirely possible for Hillary to win. Even if things don't play out the way I've described them above, the fact that we can envision scenarios where Hillary wins tells us that the Obama camp's message simply isn't true. We can win, and our chances aren't bad at all.