Jack Kelly Sunday

This week (surprise, surprise) Jack Kelly spins the Republican talking points on the Clinton/Obama race.

Surprise, surprise.

He begins with a dig (again surprise, surprise) at the New York Times:

No sooner had Sen. Hillary Clinton won a near landslide victory in the Pennsylvania primary than major media figures were renewing their calls for her to drop out of the race. But there is a whiff of panic about them now.

In an editorial Wednesday, The New York Times called Mrs. Clinton's 9.2-percentage-point victory in the nation's sixth largest state "inconclusive," and described the campaign that preceded it as "even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it."

Hmm. Interesting context for Jack to use. Let's take a look at the editorial and at where that word "inconclusive" is found. Luckily for Jack, it's found only once. In the first sentence:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Same thing with that "mean, vacuous..." stuff. By the way, he missed this part:

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

Now back to the editorial. Why would The Times use the word inconclusive?

Perhaps because before the primary Senator Obama had (according to CBS news) 1,645 delegates to Senator Clinton's 1,503. At that point, 3,148 delegates had been decided. Obama had 52.26% of the delegates and Clinton 47.74%.

As a result of the primary, Senator Clinton won 83 new delegates to Obama's 73. She chipped away 10 delegates from Obama's lead. (Note: It's not the 9 that I reported here. My apologies, I was using the numbers available to me at the time.) . So what do the percentages look like now?

Senator Obama still has the lead with 1,718 delegates to Clinton's 1,586 and that means that 3,304 delegates have been decided.

So Senator Obama now has 51.99% of the delegates to Senator Clinton's 48%. She gained 10 delegates and jumped about 1/4 of 1% in her percentage of the total number of delegates. His lead is now 10 delegates smaller and he lost about the same percentage-wise.

Since, as they say, it's all about the delegates, I'd have to say that narrowing the difference by either 10 delegates out of about 33oo, or 1/2 of 1% if we're talking percentages, is pretty, (dare I say it?) inconclusive.

His next paragraph:

Mrs. Clinton is mostly responsible for the negative tone of the campaign, according to the Times, which had endorsed her in the New York primary. She should stop criticizing Sen. Barack Obama: "If she is ever to have a hope of persuading [superdelegates] to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs," the Times said.

To read that alone, you'd think that it was just the editorialists at the Times who concluded that she is "mostly responsible for the negative tone of the campaign." But that's not exactly true.

Here's ABC:

The tough tone of the Pennsylvania Democratic campaign tarnished both candidates -- more so Hillary Clinton, with 67 percent of voters saying she attacked Barack Obama unfairly.

That puts Jack's next paragraph in a different light:

Hmm. Fifty-five percent seems like "the larger body of voters." The Clinton campaign reported she raked in nearly $10 million in contributions over the Internet in the 24 hours following her Pennsylvania win. That suggests some Democrats aren't put off by her criticisms of Mr. Obama.

Take a look at the entire paragraph that "larger body of voters" phrase comes from:

It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.

Note what Jack did. The Times was talking about voters nationwide and he countered with the percentage of voters who voted for Clinton in Pennsylvania. But he's right. "Some" voters aren't put off by her attacks on Obama. But if the ABC poll is correct, they're out numbered by 2-to-1 by those who are.

She's behind in the delegate count, she's way behind (by about a half million) in the popular vote. I know that recently Senator Clinton has been boasting that she, in fact, is in the lead with the popular vote:

"I'm very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else," Clinton said Wednesday, one day after her decisive win in Pennsylvania.

But how is that possible?

Only by, uh, disregarding the rules (to put it nicely) and adding the vote totals for Florida and Michigan - two states that broke the rules that everyone agreed to for the primaries. The only way for her to win this thins is for her to convince the super delegates to disregard the will of the majority of the Democratic voters and the majority of the delegates.

And to do that, she has to, uh, disregard the rules she'd already agreed to.

No one wants to see that more than the Republicans. The more she fights the cause she can't win, the better their chances.