Talk about coming down to the wire. I have literally been on the phone with one of my friends for the past 3 and 1/2 hours watching and waiting for the Indiana results to come in. We're watching the numbers change and calculating votes and listening to the analysts like it's the NBA playoffs! You know it's serious when you get cut off from telling a story so that you can be updated on the latest precinct numbers...LOL! I love this game!Anyway, in a hard fought battle Clinton has come away in a nail biter as the victor in my former state of residence, Indiana (I lived in Kokomo off and on over the course of 3 years). Indiana held 72 delegates of which Obama and Clinton will almost split down the middle, so basically Senator Clinton will only net 3 or 4 delegates (Obama netted 8 delegates with a win in NC, so overall he profits about 4 additional delegates...[gotta love that fuzzy math]). Clinton won with a 2% margin of victory. You can't get much closer than that (read more on CNN.com)
The hilariously frustrating part was listening to the dialogue between Wolf Blitzer, the mayor of Hammond, IN and the mayor of Gary, IN. Everybody was tired and mad because it was taking so long to count the votes in Gary. The Gary mayor kept saying over and over that it was taking a long time because they had just gotten 11,000 absentee ballots in on Monday and regular voting was Tuesday and that they wanted to take their time and count all of the votes properly, so as not to disenfranchise the voters. (Whatever dude. Ya'll took way too long with that.) The Hammond mayor made very overt suggestions that impropriety must have been taking place in Gary to cause such a delay. Now let me point out that the mayor of Gary is black and an Obama supporter and the mayor of Hammond is white and a Hillary supporter. After the results came in, the Hammond mayor hurried up and shut up about 'hanky panky' after CNN called Clinton the winner.
Anyway, Obama currently leads in pledged delegates and in states won, and he is ahead in the popular vote, if Florida and Michigan are not factored into the equation. Those states are being penalized for moving their primaries up in violation of party rules.
With neither candidate expected to win the 2,025 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination by June 3, the end of the primary season, the final decision will most likely fall to the 796 superdelegates: Democratic governors, members of Congress and party officials.
I predict that super delegates will start to take sides now. Everybody's getting tired of this race. It's time to move on to something more productive.
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