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- and the definition of MAJOR. Many of the biggest Democratic states, NY, NJ, CA, MA were on SuperTuesday.

It was not just the caucus states where Obama did better than was expected, he surged in many of these states with primaries in the last couple of weeks before SuperTuesday. Where he did not win the primaries, he got far more votes than were expected - which translated to far more delegates. I know from political people involved in the primaries in NJ (where HRC's net was 11) and MA (where her net was 17), that even a week before, Clinton was on target to get a much higher % of the vote - which would have resulted in far more votes. ) Obama needed to both keep the Clinton - Obama net delegates in the primary states low and blow out the caucuses -- resulting in being only slightly behind after SuperTuesday was processed. (Here's a chart - http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/delegates/ )

way you get delegates was not a secret or a mystery -- and the Clintons had been through it in 1992. It is bizarre some Clinton supporters think there was something nefarious or unfair in putting substantial effort into the primaries. Obama was, in fact, in a "game" which Clinton's team had a greater say in designing. In fact, it was hubris on the part of the Clintons that they thought the entire game was blowing out the SuperTuesday primaries with many pro Clinton big states including NJ moved far earlier than they had ever been in previous years.

As I said, SuperTuesday was designed as a wall to make her the defacto nominee early in February. Obama had a very steep task in that he had to keep her lead very small in terms of delegates.Note that at SuperTuesday, she and Obama were essentially equal - and her teams tactic then was to raise the issue of the superdelegates perhaps going with a "better" candidate than the one who won most publicly determined delegates.

As said, I am speaking ONLY of how poor her political team was in supporting her in 2008. That does reflect on the team's political ability -- and you might note that for 2016, many people have been named as on the team or likely to be on the team --- not so the name - Mark Penn. It does work against the narrative that the Clintons are political masterminds - in fact a better argument could be made that Bill Clinton is a natural politician, who radiates charisma as a candidate. However, 1992 was a year any Democrat would win (Bush was below 40%) and he could run on good times in 1996 against a lousy opponent, Bob Dole. Between 1992, 1996 and 2008 it is hard to make a case (other than "but he won&quot that they were masterful political strategists. They just keep telling us they were.