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Sunday: A supporter holds up a sign as Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event in Eleanor, W. Va. (AP Photo)

Hillary Clinton is campaigning in West Virginia Monday, a day ahead of what is supposed to be a blow-out victory for her in the Mountain State, but one that will be mostly hollow.

Even if Clinton wins 100 percent of the vote and the accompanying 275 delegates available — including superdelegates (some of whom have already committed) — in the six remaining Democratic contests, she will end up short of the 2,025 delegates needed to win the presidential nomination. All the Democratic contests are proportional allocation of delegates. She could, however, still win over some of the roughly 200-plus of the 795 superdelegates still outstanding in all the other states combined.

Even if Florida and Michigan, which were penalized for holding their primaries early, are counted, it is very difficult for Clinton to overcome Barack Obama in the numbers race.

Clinton still fares well among working-class white voters, women and older Americans. Those demographics are expected to carry her to a triumph Tuesday and another in Kentucky next week.

Campaigning in the capital of Charleston, Clinton thanked supporters and reminded them that no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning West Virginia. She also reassured volunteers that she’s sticking it out.

“I’ll work hard for you. Get everyone out to vote tomorrow,” she told diners in a restaurant.

Clinton rejects any suggestion that she’s dropping out of the race. She used campaign stops Sunday to remind voters of women who didn’t give up in difficult situations, who fought for equal rights, broke into male-dominated professions and succeeded when others told them to quit.

She quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, telling supporters: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know strong she is until she is in hot water.” Earlier in the day, she read letters from supporters urging her not to give up.

Her supporters question why Obama hasn’t been able to seal the deal, with so few delegates left to win.

“Why can’t Senator Obama beat Senator Clinton in West Virginia? Voters there have heard that he’s the presumptive nominee,” Clinton campaign strategist Howard Wolfson said on “FOX News Sunday.” “They’ve seen the great press he’s gotten in the past couple of days. Let’s let them decide. They have an opportunity. They want to end this on Tuesday, they’re perfectly capable of it.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Independent Democrat who has offered his support to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, said Clinton clearly still believes in herself.

“She is a very strong person, she’s very capable. She obviously believes that she is able to be a better president than Senator Obama and also that she has a better chance to beat John McCain. And I think that she just feels that she’s going to stay in there until Senator Obama actually has won it. And she has a right to do that, more power to her,” he said.

David Gergen, former White House adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, said in an AP Broadcast interview in San Francisco, “She says ‘full steam ahead,’ (but) her problem is that she’s running out of track.”

“She was the inevitable nominee and I think they misjudged what they were up against,” Gergen added. “Along comes this phenomenon named Barack Obama and upsets everybody’s calculations. The real problem in the (Clinton) campaign was that they weren’t adaptable, they were not able to change game plan right in the middle once it looked like they had a real fight on their hands.”

For its part the Obama campaign isn’t sweating the concluding races. The candidate campaigned briefly in West Virginia on Monday before heading to Kentucky in what can only be seen as courtesy stops.

While 160 delegates shy of sealing the nomination, Obama instead is focusing on McCain.

Campaign strategist David Axelrod said Obama is “very seriously” considering taking the campaign on the road with McCain for one-on-one town-hall style meetings.

“We’re at war. Our economy is in turmoil. And we’ve got so many challenges that the people of this country deserve a serious discourse, and it shouldn’t be limited necessarily to three kind of very regimented debates in the fall. We ought to begin sooner, and we ought to have a free-flowing conversation about where we want to take this country. So you know, we’re interested in that proposal and eager to sit down and talk about it,” he told “FOX News Sunday.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 10:24 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Top Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.