Super Tuesday II Results: Obama Holds Advantage Over Hillary

The Clintonistas are everywhere today spreading falsehoods about being back in control and claiming momentum towards the nomination.

Only one problem: Even with the aid of Rush Limbaugh and cross-voting Republicans looking to aid Hillary and hurt Barack Obama, Barack still finished yesterday with his delegate lead in tact--and there's no way Hillary can catch up.

The truth is that Hillary saw her massive leads in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont diminish over the course of a few weeks. While she had to win big, Obama neutralized her advantages and came out with a tie in delegates earned. The real results: Obama won more delegates than Hillary in Texas and Vermont; and Hillary won more in Ohio and Rhode Island.

Here's the Obama campaign's view of yesterday's results:

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday's elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That's a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.

For comparison, that's less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It's also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it's considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

They failed.

Having failed to make up ground, Hillary's task is now even more taunting. Of the 14 or remaining primaries (assuming Michigan and Florida do overs), Hillary will have to get something like 97% of the remaining delegates in order to win the Democratic Party nomination out right. In addition to winning more states than Hillary (25.5 vs 11.5), Obama has a comfortable margin in total votes cast (12,890,000 to 12,130,000).

Hillary's strategy thus far has been to use fear of change, fear of black man as president and fear of a terrorist attack, along with assorted other untruths, against Obama. She's even accepted the active support of the country's harshest rightwingers hellbent on preventing an Obama presidency, and she's betrayed all of Obama's Democratic supporters by saying that only she and John McCain are prepared to be president but not Senator Obama.

So after yesterday, Hillary's no closer to winning the nomination on her own, yet her campaign is even more committed to using shameful tactics that can only gravely damage Obama's chances in the fall should he be the party's nominee.