Obama Claims the (Thorny) Crown

His blowout victories yesterday in the Potomac Primaries have prompted Barack Obama's campaign to finally embrace his frontrunner status. After weeks of downplaying expectations, even before contests where he led in the polls by 20+ percentage points, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe today said: “We believe that it's next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close the delegate count,” he told reporters on a conference call. “The only way to close the pledged delegate lead -- they really need to win Ohio and Texas by more than 20 points. We think we can amass a large number of delegates in both those states.”

Plouffe said by their estimate they have a 136 pledged delegate lead and underlined that they have now won more primaries – 12 to her nine – than Clinton (for those Clintonistas still using the "he-only-wins-caucuses" argument). Looking ahead to the next contests, Wisconsin and Hawaii, Plouffe dropped the pretense of lowering expectations. “We think we're going to do very very well that day,” he said, adding they are already building organizations in the states holding contests the rest of March, including Mississippi, Wyoming, Rhode Island and Guam (Guam?!).

“At this point even the most creative math does not get her” the nomination, Plouffe crowed. “We really think that that's highly unlikely that that (lead) will be eroded.”

Of course, Clinton's campaign believes they still have a shot in Ohio and Texas on March 4 and are working hard in both states. And Clintons generally excel at being the underdogs – which makes me wonder what kind of interesting Obama opposition research is coming down the pike. Let the scrutiny of the new frontrunner begin!

Update:
Clinton senior strategist Mark Penn held a conference call of his own this afternoon where they said they plan on coming within 25 delegates of Obama (including Supers here) after Ohio and Texas on March 4th, restoring the race to an essential tie.

Asked if they are now the underdogs, Penn said, “This is a tied ball game, roughly 2,000 delegates have been selected… A couple of hand fulls of delegates separate the candidates. Senator Obama has had a good last couple of days. We believe that it will remain a close race.” Later in the call he made a somewhat more outrageous claim: “Senator Obama is now the Washington candidate coming out of this primary.” (Does he really mean to say that by winning Washington DC, Obama becomes the Inside-the-Beltway candidate?)

Some interesting highlights of the call:
1) They hardly mentioned Wisconsin and Hawaii, the next states to vote on February 19, except to challenge Obama to debate in Wisconsin. “If Senator Obama doesn't have time to give Wisconsin voters 90 minutes on the issues, he's going to have a difficult time explaining that,” Penn said, noting HRC is running a tv ad in the cheese-head state to that effect.

2) They emphasized that Hillary leads in polls in the remaining big three delegate-rich states of Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania (which doesn't vote until April 22) which make up 64% of the remaining pledged delegates.

3) They underlined that NO ONE will win the nomination without Super Delegates: “Neither camp is in the position to win this election without the support of Super Delegates,” Penn said.

4) Finally, echoing HRC's speech last night, Penn stressed her new message: “Senator Clinton is the only one in the 21st Century-solutions business instead of in the promise business.”

So, in summary: Obama's narrative is they're winning, but Hillary's campaign says they AREN'T losing. Does Mark Penn really think that, after 18 debates, Obama's going to give in to their demands to hold more debates when it doesn't play to his advantage? After next week's contests we're all going to need a calculator and a lesson in Texas' screwy primary/caucus hybrid to figure out which campaign is right: will it be impossible for Hillary to make up the distance? And, finally, will it all come down to those Super-Duper Delegates and what's Democratic democratic about that?