Last summer, George W. Bush told The Washington Examiner’s Bill Sammon that Hillary Clinton would probably be the 2008 Democratic nominee. “She’s got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary,” he said. “And therefore the person with the national presence who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites has got a good chance to be nominated.”

This seemed a reasonable judgment at the time. It may still turn out to be right. But today Barack Obama is neck-and-neck with Clinton in the national polls  and he’s shown a greater ability to raise money. After his strong showing over the weekend, it is Obama who now has the clearer path to his party’s nomination.

I’ll avoid a false precision in the numbers that follow. There are minor differences among news organizations in projecting delegate allocations in states that have already voted, and in counting preferences among the 796 elected officials and party leaders  the “superdelegates”  who vote according to their choice, not voters’ instruction.

Obama leads Clinton by roughly 70 delegates among about 2,000 chosen so far in primaries and caucuses. (There are still about 1,200 delegates outstanding.) Among the superdelegates, Clinton is ahead by about 100 superdelegates among the 300 who have declared a preference (though any of them can change their mind, so a count of them now is in large measure premature). All in all, Clinton seems to be slightly ahead.