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American President Odds: Hillary's still scrapping but she's running out of rounds

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Hillary Clinton is running out of time if she wants to close the gap on Barack Obama and take the Democratic nomination, say Chicken Dinner...

The BBC had an excellent line on the desperate nature of the race for the Democratic nomination earlier this week. As Barack Obama sat down in a diner to eat some disgusting sausage on a waffle floating in syrup combination in an attempt to get across his regular-guy credentials, the reporter said "These people will eat anything to win."

The candidates' queasiness, however, is nothing compared to the nausea felt by everyone else who has been dragged along on this interminable journey, and who stopped asking "Are we there yet?" months ago.

The only person still feeling chipper at this stage is Hillary Clinton, following her win in the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday, which was by a big enough margin (10%) to keep her in the race. Yet she still lags in the delegate count and the popular vote, and is running out of time to close the gap. All her hopes rest on the superdelegates at the August convention getting behind her. So at 5.9 on Betfair to win the nomination (Barack is 1.26), is there any point investing any more money in Hillary?

The delegate count. Hillary may have taken Pennsylvania, but as that state's delegates are allocated proportionally, it didn't really help her close the gap on her rival, who has 1710 delegates to her 1584, with nine smallish primaries to go. She claimed "the tide is turning" in her victory speech, but the remaining primaries are likely to divide obediently along the same lines as the race so far; North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota and perhaps Montana for Obama, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia for Clinton. Puerto Rico and Guam also vote, and at the end of it Obama will have more delegates, just not enough to confirm victory. For the superdelegates to then ignore the delegate count and back Clinton would cause the kind of havoc that could torpedo the Democratic party's presidential hopes, as Obama's followers would find it impossible to vote for her.

The popular vote. In their straw-clutching process, the Clinton campaign is trying to argue that the superdelegates should pay less attention to the delegate count and more to the number of votes. Hillary still lags, but is expected to close the gap to within a couple of hundred thousand, and has also carried the most populous states in the country. Yet the fact remains that Obama is more likely to win of the popular vote.

Electability. Another of the Clinton campaign's arguments is that she can beat John McCain and Obama can't, yet the Real Clear Politics (realclearpolitics.com) average of polls has them both neck and neck with the Republican candidate. As to who genuinely stands the better chance, only the presidential campaign will tell, but a lot of it will come down to...

Funding. Obama is crushing Hillary in the race for funds, and you can't spread the message without cash. He has $42 million in the bank, she is $10 million in the red. One commentator described it as like an electoral cold war - he spent so much in Pennsylvania that she went broke trying to keep up.

Negative campaigning. This is really Hillary's last bullet, and it's not a very scary one. "Barack cannot close the deal," has become the Clinton mantra, as if it were somehow his fault that she hasn't quit. She is probably a more savvy political operator than he is - when he went bowling in Pennsylvania she made sure the cameras snapped her in a bar doing whiskey shots - but with so few primaries left, low blows, however stinging, are unlikely to narrow the gap enough to make the superdelegates think again.