Obama less than 50 delegates away from nod.

This is one of those little markers that I’m always happy to see pass. Barack Obama is now 48.5 delegates away from sealing the deal for the Democratic nomination, leaving Hillary needing 243.5 and, by most rational calculations, in an insurmountable deficit.

Barring any ginormous upsets or unprecedented changeovers in the superdelegate field, I cannot see any way in which Hillary would be able to take the baton.

Florida and Michigan, despite everyone’s constant yammering about them, are really non-issues. The dirty little secret that Hillary Clinton won’t admit to is that she really doesn’t want those primaries re-opened, she wants to get the delegates she already “won” there. If the elections happen again down there, Obama may not win, but he certainly won’t lose by anything resembling enough of a margin to swing the totals in Clinton’s favor.

All the “Florida and Michigan or bust!” trumpeting does is chip away at Obama’s legitimacy when he inevitably takes the nomination and, the Clinton camp hopes, those two states are still neglected. The worst thing for Hillary Clinton right now is that those two primaries are revisited and she still loses the nomination.

Like Ron Paul’s popularity largely hinging on his exclusion from debates, Clinton’s supporters can only clamor that she is the “real” nominee as long as the wild cards of Florida and Michigan remain unsettled.