Ben Smith of the Politico has some posts up today with major convention implications. He's put up a spreadsheet that Bloomberg News obtained, apparently an internal Obama campaign worksheet that attempts to project where the race is headed. It's of prurient interest, but most of its scenarios are fairly conservative, and there's not much news in it.
The big deal, though, is in a few boxes at the bottom. Obama's campaign lists the current superdelegate tally as 159-209. That's 40-50 more than any public tally I've seen. And it gets more interesting - Ben queried the Obama camp, and discovered that they're now claiming the backing of 170 superdelegates.
A word of caution. They haven't substantiated that with lists of names - as of this morning, only 113 endorsements had been publicly announced. And its perfectly plausible that Hillary has her own internal tally which also shows her doing better than the major media organizations project. But given that this spreadsheet, on the whole, is fairly conservative, and it does the Obama camp no good to delude itself as to how many delegates are going for Hillary, I'd say its prima facie evidence that Obama has finally closed the superdelegate gap. If he's really trailing by just 40, and his Super Tuesday projections hold up, then the overall gap is now in the single digits. And that would be huge news.
(And, for readers just joining me, I discussed this morning why the gap is at least four delegates smaller than any current count.)
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