The little Delegate Assignment toy over at CNN.com is pretty cool. It has allowed me to play hypothetical games all primary season long. Now, it’s proving the point that more and more pundits keep making - it is a virtual mathematical impossibility for Hillary Clinton to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Assume first that all of the current Super Delegates will continue to support whomever they have committed to supporting and the remainder are just waiting until the convention in June. Clinton would have to win at least 86% of the vote in all five remaining primaries just to break even with Obama. Not the 67% she won in West Virginia (which I think says more about the state than about her candidacy) - 86%! And this is assuming these remaining states don’t award any delegates to contenders who receive less than 15% of the vote, which effectively knocks them out of the race.

So, what this tells me is the only way she can win at this point is if something dreadful happens to to Obama. Something like him dying or he decided to leave the race because he’d rather spend more time with his family, or the rumors of him studying at a madrassa as a child are not only true, but he is actually Osama Bin Laden in disguise! Even then I’d bet he’d get more than 16% in Kentucky.

She’s within her rights to continue driving herself into deep debt, to continue pushing her campaign faithful on a tedious, fruitless death march toward nothing, to continue arguing her electability while registered Democrats continue to prove her wrong. Had she gracefully bowed out after the loss in North Carolina and disappointingly close win in Indiana, she might still have some political clout. Perhaps she could be vice president or take a high-level cabinet position or something. Now? I wouldn’t touch her politically with a ten point poll (see what I did there?). The win in West Virginia is, well… a fluke. It’s really too little too late, quite honestly. To pin the future of the campaign on one win - albeit a solid win - amidst a raft of crushing losses is embarrassingly short-sighted. And the continued insistence that the Michigan and Florida votes be counted reeks of desperation - they made their decision, they knew the consequences, their votes are null and void. If those voters have anyone they should be angry with, it’s with their state party leaders, who ought to be run out on a rail for what they did.

The bottom line: why would I want to vote for a presidential candidate who can’t do math? Her insistence on seeing this campaign through to the end only makes her more unelectable. I mean, how easy will it be to put up attack ads against her, pointing out that even the Democrats didn’t think she was ready for the position?

While I’m bitching, I’ve got a bone to pick with Howard Dean, the Democratic Party National Chairman. The first party leader who weeks ago said that Hillary ought to drop out because the campaign is tearing the party apart should have been publicly pilloried. Here’s the spin they should be using: We’re seeing a new era for the Democrats and for progressive political change in this country. It would be one thing if we had just one solid candidate who will shine through in November, but we have two amazing, competent candidates who, in addition to being historical, are also fierce competitors against anything the weakened Republican Party can throw at them. Our party is practically deadlocked between these two amazing candidates and the numbers at the primary voting booths, which look an awful lot like the larger numbers we typically expect from the general election, prove how strong this party has become. We shouldn’t call for one candidate to drop out, we should be celebrating the vibrant, healthy debates on policy and the future of the country this primary season is generating. This is a rallying cry for all of those in this country who are tired of the corrupt political gaming and fear mongering that have been a hallmark of the current administration. The Republicans are so weak, in fact, their current nominee is someone Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry extended the vice presidential ticket to in 2004! We have nothing but admiration for John McCain as a politician, as a war hero and as an individual who seems committed to bipartisan resolutions to the problems that plague this nation. But he is supported by the same gang of individuals who used poorly collected and poorly vetted intelligence to turn our focus away from protecting this nation from Al Qaeda’s international terrorist network and instead dragged us into a senseless, endless war in Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks that occurred on 9/11 or the organization responsible for committing them.

Howard Dean seems content to let the bloggers and Daily Show do all his work for him while he and his team wring their hands over the destruction caused to the Democratic Party by - yes, I’m going to say it - the democratic process. Good God, man… this is an incredible opportunity to highlight the party’s strengths demonstrated through BOTH of these candidates! It’s entirely possible to do this without endorsing one over the other. Instead, the Dems are doing what they always do - standing on the sidelines like a character played by Woody Allen hoping that it doesn’t all fall apart before their eyes. The Republicans eat our lunch election after election because they are masters of spin. They can lie like mad and never get caught. The Democrats are in a situation right now where the truth itself is sending a powerful message, and they’re just standing aside and letting it play out rather than capitalizing on it, while idiots like Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News denigrate the candidates and bolster their support for John McCain, who looks downright sane at this point.

I’ve already tossed my hat in the Obama camp’s ring. Clinton says he’s all talk, but, frankly, I feel this nation could use an inspiring voice, one that lifts us up and encourages us to be the nation we know we can be instead of the voices we’ve heard for the past seven years encouraging us to hide under our beds and duct tape plastic over the windows. 9/11 made the world a dangerous and scary place - not because of the attacks on the World Trade Center, but because of our nation’s response. We have watched complicitly while our troops are sent to defend us in our name to a nation that posed no threat to us. We have cowered in fear while our government has passed laws intended to spy on us and keep us in line, eroding the personal and civil liberties we had come to value as hallmark rights in the land of the free. What we need now is a voice that encourage us to rise above the dark times and do what’s necessary to bring this nation back to where it was, at the apex of western civilization. I don’t feel Barack Obama is some super hero who can do this on his own, but his words of inspiration - which I hope will follow with acts of courage - will help lift every one of us up and inspire us to make a difference. He seems to me to be like the mythical John F. Kennedy who made a promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, encouraged thousands of young volunteers to join the Peace Corps and make a difference in the world and inspired so many of the current politicians and individuals I admire today. Obama is our generation’s Kennedy, and I’m looking forward to eight years of hope.