Sean Wilentz has a pro-Hillary essay at salon.com that arguing that "if the system made sense," Hillary Clinton would win.

Wilentz favors a state-based winner-take-all system, and it is indeed true that if we retroactively instituted a winner-take-all delegate allocation method, Clinton would have a lock on the nomination.

But there's a glaring flaw with this argument: if the system were winner-take-all, Obama would have used a different strategy -- resulting in different outcome.

Under the current system, you don't want to just win, you want to win big. There's also tons of bizarre quirks. For example, if you can get 50.1% in a district with an odd number of delegates, you can get 60% of the delegates. It pays to get 62.5% as opposed to 62.4%. (In Mississippi, a blogger noticed an error in math that had inadvertently put Obama under the 62.5% mark; once corrected, Obama netted 2 delegates.)

Obama expertly exploited this system. It's Clinton's fault that she didn't understand the system, and frankly, it suggests that she wouldn't be as good a president as some people think.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure the correct strategy for winning more delegates, and Hillary Clinton's failure to comprehend that strategy speaks poorly of her analytical and/or management skills.

Now, let's say that our system were the one Wilentz proposes. (I don't see why he should think winner-take-all is any better than the current one, other than if it were retroactively applied it would help his candidate win.)

If the system were winner-take-all, Obama would have spent far more time focused on California and Texas in particular. He still would have most of the states that he has currently won, but by smaller margins. Who knows what would have happened, but I actually suspect Obama would have pulled it out.

As you might know, I live in Las Vegas, and I like to play poker from time to time. Wilentz's argument is like the person who says: man, if deuces were wild, I'd have won me a big pot! Yeah, easy to say that, but if deuces were wild, everybody would play differently against the guy who had all the deuces.

And right now, Hillary Clinton has all the deuces she can handle -- and nothing to do with 'em.