For anyone who’s still not convinced that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is a lost cause, check out Slate’s enormously fun delegate calculator, which will likely surpass the Nintendo Wii in sales this upcoming holiday season.  It’s not perfect– delegate totals are just as dependent on where the votes are coming from as how many– but it still gives a good general idea of what each candidate needs to do from here on.  As you can see from the screenshot below, factoring in last night’s results, Clinton could win 60% of the remaining votes and still lose the pledged delegate count to Barack Obama.

So can she do it?  In a word, no.  Of the 41 contests thus far, she’s only won 60% or more of the vote once– in her former home state of Arkansas.  She only managed 57% of the vote in New York.  And keep in mind that upcoming states like North Carolina and Mississippi are likely to be big wins for Obama, making Clinton’s necessary percentage of the overall vote that much higher.  If Obama only manages to split North Carolina and Mississippi 50%-50%, that would push Clinton’s necessary percentage of the vote in the rest of the remaining states to 64%.

Which means unless the Clinton campaign can dig up a major scandal on Barack Obama within the next seven weeks that forces him out of the race, the Democratic Party has already chosen its nominee.  Everything from now until the day Hillary Clinton concedes is a waste of time and resources.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a great post up that is almost changing my mind on this.  He argues that, true, Hillary mathematically can’t win the pledged delegate count.  But Barack Obama can’t just sit on the lead he built up in February, let it dwindle down by half or more over a three month period, and expect to be handed the nomination either.

If Clinton can take Obama down a few notches over the next seven weeks, put a significant dent into his lead (even without catching up), and grab a clear amount of momentum going into the convention– not to mention if she finds a way to get the Michigan and Florida delegates seated– she can make a legitimate argument for the nomination.  She’ll be able to say that even though Obama won a lot more states and more delegates, she won all the big states (except Illinois) and only clearly lost one month (February) out of the final five.  Without the majority of pledged delegates on her side, it won’t be a strong argument.  But it will be legitimate.

Here’s Josh Marshall’s take on Hillary’s chances:

At the end of the day, the winner of the pledged delegate race has the strongest claim to the nomination. Everything else is spin. But it’s a strong claim, not incontestable.

Let’s hypothesize for a moment a scenario in which March 4th broke the back of Obama’s campaign. He emerges bloodied and doesn’t seem to be able to stand up to Hillary’s assault. His delegate margin is big enough that she can’t catch up. But she runs through the next dozen or however many remaining contests there are making up steady ground on the pledged delegate front. I don’t think a small margin of pledged delegates will be enough if Obama looks like a damaged candidate who seems unable to fight off a determined and ruthless opponent. Just hanging on to the margin he banked in February won’t be enough because fundamentally, if neither candidate has it locked by the convention, the super delegates will want to pick the candidate who looks like the general election winner and is the favorite of Democrats at the time of the convention, two qualifiers which are in practice two sides of the same coin.

I don’t think the above is a likely scenario. In fact, I think it’s quite unlikely. Almost everything remains stacked against Hillary. There’s no denying that. But I think this does point to what this debate — literal and meta — will turn on over the next couple weeks.