Below The Beltway

Hillary Clinton spent the day yesterday trying to convince Democratic superdelegates that she has a credible claim for the party’s nomination:

Seizing on her Pennsylvania primary victory, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her surrogates are renewing their efforts to have the disputed Michigan and Florida convention delegates seated and pushing the argument that she now leads in the total number of votes cast when the tallies in those two states are included.

The Democratic Party leadership does not recognize the results of those contests because the states broke party rules by holding early primaries. But on Thursday, a Michigan superdelegate supporting Mrs. Clinton filed a complaint with the national Democratic Party demanding that at least half the state’s delegates be seated at the convention.

The complaint by Joel I. Ferguson, a developer in Lansing and a member of the Democratic National Committee, is similar to a plea from supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Florida.

The D.N.C. officials said they were reviewing the complaints, which will be considered by the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which punished the states for their early primaries by denying their delegations seats at the national convention in August.

The effort is the latest by Mrs. Clinton to capitalize on her nine-point victory in Pennsylvania and convince the 300 uncommitted party leaders that she has a rightful claim to the nomination. Pushing those efforts, she also met privately on Wednesday and Thursday with uncommitted superdelegates at Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, during a rare evening and morning off the campaign trail.

In the meetings, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, talked about her victory in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and her political strength among important voter groups, like women and blue-collar workers, whom the Democrats want to hold onto in the general election, her advisers said. She also talked about her fund-raising success over the last few days, after weeks when she was at a disadvantage to her Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

But she also set aside time to answer superdelegates’ questions and to try to allay their concerns about the effect of a protracted nomination fight on the party’s ability to unify around a nominee by the start of the fall campaign, according to the advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. They declined to name the people Mrs. Clinton had lobbied.

Looking at the delegate count, it seems at first blush that Clinton has an argument:

So, if you include Florida and Michigan, and even all the estimated caucuses, Clinton is ahead right ?

Not so fast.

As I noted on Wednesday, there is a fundamental problem with including Hillary’s votes in Michigan specifically. Obama wasn’t on the ballot there so, technically, he gets no votes from Michigan. However, if you include the 238,000+ votes that uncommitted got in Michigan as Obama votes, then Obama beats Hillary no matter what popular vote scenario you look at.