The death knell

Why Hillary is finished after last night's primaries.

For those unaware, Indiana and North Carolina each held primaries last night. Barack Obama had long been projected to win North Carolina, and Hillary Clinton was supposed to win Indiana. Then the recent Rev. Jeremiah Wright imbroglio started up again, and people thought Obama would do much worse than expected. Hooray for lowered expectations! Obama won North Carolina by 15 points (which is actually less than he was supposed to win it by a couple of weeks ago) and narrowly lost Indiana, effectively murdering any remaining spark of hope Clinton had of winning the race.

How can that be, you ask? Isn't Obama's lead only 150 or so delegates? Aren't there still several more contests to go? Actually, the primary season is very nearly over. (FINALLY.) There are only six more primaries to go, with a total of 217 delegates left. Obama's lead is roughly 150 delegates. Hillary would have to win something like 86 percent of the remaining delegates to get a lead in pledged delegates, and even then she has to convince about 70 percent of the superdelegates. (I'm not just pulling these numbers out of the air. You can see for yourself by using Slate's delegate calculator.) This isn't even close to realistic. Hillary has only won one blowout state, and that was her home state of Arkansas. She doesn't have a prayer anymore. In the next few days and weeks, you can expect to see superdelegates flocking to Obama in droves.

The moral of the story? Clinton can't win unless it comes out that Obama was caught having gay sex with Adolf Hitler's corpse while defecating on a lapel pin. Or something like that.