Pennsylvania: The Democratic Last Stand?

Pennsylvania held their Democratic Primary today. It is the first Primary to be held in 6 weeks and has really been long awaited. Well, the polls are closed and the Primary is over now. While results are not in yet, will the results make a difference? At this point, the results are too close to tell. If Barack Obama manages to pull of a win, it will be a surprise, though he's risen in the polls from having Hillary Clinton 20 points above him, but would it be the end? Surely if Clinton has not pulled off a win today, there will be many more Democrats calling for her to step down. But will she? Will it even make a difference, the results? If she does win, will it be enough for her to continue? I don't think it matters, as she will still be in it. The Clintons don't step down...

At this point, Hillary Clinton isn't really looking to pull ahead in the delegate count. She's going to basically ignore that, as it is practically unimaginable that she can overcome that deficit, even if she wins big today and wins all of the remaining primaries and the last caucus. What she will look for and hope for is to at the least pull ahead in the popular vote. If she has this, she will surely use it as an argument to Superdelegates to consider voting in her favor. Is this really enough to get favor towards her?

Hillary Clinton has grasped to everything and anything to use to bolster herself up. When she was losing primary after primary to Obama, she discounted these losses by saying that they were "red states", they would never vote for Obama in the Fall, they had caucuses and these weren't "fair", and basically in essence, that these states that Obama won did not matter. She basically cut up the map into states that she won, which would matter in November, and the states that Obama won that were basically unimportant. As he won more primaries and caucuses than Clinton, her camp continued to discount the wins and put her up as still the one to choose. When it became seemingly impossible for her to overtake Obama in the delegate count, she basically quit looking at that as an indicator. She won't take that into consideration now, while trying to persuade the Superdelegates to back her, despite the fact that this is a race to get the most delegates. That's what it is and it's no surprise, yet she'll avoid that fact and take another angle.

Now, as I've started writing this, I saw that Clinton is claimed to have won Pennsylvania and, "The former first lady was winning 53 percent of the vote to 47 percent for her rival with 14 percent of the vote counted, and she hoped for significant inroads into Obama's overall lead in the competition for delegates to the Democratic National Convention", according to the Associated Press. Well, this will surely mean that Clinton is not going to step down, though I didn't have any illusions that she would, either way. With this win in her pocket, she'll still be in a very very tough position. She'll need to win Indiana and she really can't afford to lose any of the races, though North Carolina is already looking strongly favorable for Obama. It's tough to say how this race will play out from here, but it still looks like, at this point, it's Barack Obama's race to lose and Hillary basically has to just wait and hope that he makes a big blunder or that something comes to light that really hurts his image...