He may be a corrupt and divisive politician, but his handlers aren't stupid, and Axelrod would never let him declare victory and then have the SD returns come in showing that he's a loser.  

He doesn't dare declare victory, but if he is allowing Hillary to give her speech first, he might twist her words to pull another attempt at illusionary success.

Hillary's speech tonight will not be a concession. She is going to explain her next phase of the campaign tonight, and that's all.

Obama hasn't won according to the Democratic nomination rules.

The delegate count is as ridiculous now as what happened on Saturday, where the smokefilled room was

(as Anglachel nails it this morning:)

The afternoon session was supposed to begin at 3:15.  THE PUBLIC which has a right to attend business meetings of official party committees, were told to BE IN THEIR SEATS at 3:15.  And we, the rest of the public who were participants in the meeting via C-Span, were also IN OUR SEATS.

Neither Roosevelt, Herman, nor Germond, the three party officials responsible for recovening the meeting AS SCHEDULED AND ANNOUNCED showed up to do so.  Instead, they sat in a "back room" discussing "party business" for two more hours, until they had the votes to railroad through three resolutions woth no real discussion.

The committee had ONE HOUR -- the lunch break -- to broker their deal.  After that, NO business that was before the committee should have been discussed behind closed doors.

So the votes are void.  The number is still 2025, and all that was accomplished is that we now know that Barack Obama is contemptuous of Jewish voters, Latino voters, Female voters, and older voters -- all of whom turned out in record number to support Hillary Clinton and give her a huge delegate advantage in Florida, that Barack Obama wanted to cut in half by treating them as less worthy of being counted than the founders thought slaves were worthy of being counted.

Here's a link to an article about this -- warning, it's on townhall.com.

2209 has not been the number ever since Florida and Michigan were stripped of 100% of their delegates back in 2007. From that point on, the number was 2025 (again, 50% +1 of the number of all available delegates).

I don't know what the reasoning behind arguing that 2118 is not "the number" might be. At this point, there are a set number of delegates that will be seated at the convention.

Obama's campaign is only classy if one sees so called 'hardball' tactics like fanning fake RFK/racist outrage out of gossamer as sophisticated politics rather than crass sensationalism.

Sadly overlooked in that repugnant spectacle was the element of exploiting Sen. Kennedy's life-and-death situation for headlines. Class? Hardly.

Rather than taking even a pause to appreciate a champion of democratic values and principles TeamObama behaved like media hyenas scavenging cheap media moments for a transitory phenom.

Class? No.

Did Kennedy concede?
Did Jesse Jackson concede?
Did Jerry Brown concede?

Were they nuts, too?  

he is going to look like a fool if he loses even one of these states.