Posted March 25, 2008 – Hillary Clinton’s camp says she’s ahead right now – depending on how you look at it.

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A key Clinton surrogate says he’s come up with the ultimate solution for deciding who should get the support of the Democratic Party’s super-delegates, given that neither Clinton nor Barack Obama will win enough elected delegates (2,025) to claim the nomination outright. 

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh says that Electoral College votes in each state won by the candidates should be tallied to determine the nominee.

“So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” Bayh said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

If the Democratic Party went along with that plan – which seems highly unlikely, pundits say – Clinton would suddenly become the frontrunner, even though she trails in the number of elected delegates, the popular vote and the total number of states won.

 Clinton’s states would give her 219 Electoral College votes (excluding Florida and Michigan ), while Obama would be awarded 202. Naturally, Obama’s camp was quick to dismiss the plan as an act of desperation. 

By The New York Times’ count, Obama has 1,622 elected delegates to Clinton ’s 1,472; he leads in popular votes by 700,000; and he has won 27 states, compared to 14 for Clinton. 

A newly released national poll also shows Obama up by 3 percentage points, a 10-percent turnaround since the Illinois senator’s likeability plummeted amid the uproar over his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s curious that Clinton ’s camp would point to the Electoral College as the last bastion of fairness considering the New York senator’s longstanding position on the institution.

In 2000, when Florida’s 25 electoral was the straw that tipped the scale toward George W. Bush over the collector of the most popular votes, Vice President Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, a newly elected senator, was incredulous.

“I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president,” she railed at the time.

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