What 'Tide Is Turning'? Laundry Detergent?

The new Hillary babble phrase is apparently "the tide is turning." Yet despite her single digit win in PA -- yes, it's officially 9.2% as of 11am EST -- she still trails in pledged delegates, money, and votes.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder speculates that the narrow Clinton victory in PA may spur more superdelegates to declare for Obama. Perhaps proving his point, the Daily Oklahoman reported that Gov. Brad Henry, "who said earlier he would not endorse a Democratic presidential candidate until this summer's national convention, announced this morning he is supporting Barack Obama."

MSNBC's First Read has a nice summary of the post-PA state of the contest. Some excerpts:

Obama leads in pledged delegates per the NBC hard count (1482 to 1326), overall delegates (1720 to 1588), the popular vote (14,447,568 to 13,964,439), and total number of contests won (29 to 15). Note: We’re not including Texas in this last total, given that Clinton won the primary but Obama won the caucus and netted the most delegates. That new popular vote total (not counting FL or MI) has Obama leading Clinton, 49%-47%. For those keeping score, that's a difference of 483,129.

those remaining contests, per this conservative projection, bring Obama’s popular vote lead to 515,629. If you add Florida, that gives Clinton almost another 300,000 more. So you if you include the Sunshine State, Obama will still lead her by about 215,000 popular votes. No wonder Clinton herself decided to start talking about Michigan again, because she can't "win" the popular vote without it. The problem: Even many Clinton supporters believe it’s not a valid measurement.

Turning to the delegate math, if Clinton nets approximately 16 delegates out of Pennsylvania, she'll trail in the pledged battle by 150 delegates. With just 408 pledged delegates remaining, that means she'd need 68% of all pledged delegates left to overtake Obama. Now, if Obama and Clinton simply split the 187 delegates up for grabs on May 6 basically down the middle (which would be a rosy projection in Clinton's favor) and Obama's pledged delegate lead simply stayed at 150 and didn’t grow to 160 (the most likely outcome in two weeks), Clinton would need to win 85% of the then 221 remaining delegates up for grabs. 85%! As we mentioned on air last night, the battle for pledged delegates is over, Obama will win that metric and win it by some 100+ delegates.

Meanwhile, the NY Times, which endorsed Clinton, now says "It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election."