Ah, the popular vote. Hillary Clinton isn't planning to let go--so neither will we.

Yesterday, we reported that former DNC chairman--and current Clinton adviser--Terry McAuliffe appeared on MSNBC mere seconds after Clinton won Pennsylvania's primary and announced that she "will have moved ahead in the popular vote... by the time we finish this process." Now the campaign is saying she's already there. According to my colleague Suzanne Smalley, Clinton's aides staked out the aisle of the press plane yesterday morning and proclaimed that with Pennsylvania's big victory, Clinton had finally won more votes, overall, than Barack Obama. And on the stump in Indianapolis, the candidate herself chimed in. "I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else," she said. 

Is this true? Sure--if you ignore (or, to put it less mildly, disenfranchise) hundreds of thousands of likely Obama voters. Here's why: any vote tally that shows Clinton in the lead has to include Michigan; without it, she trails by at least 200,000. The problem is, while Clinton won 328,309 votes in the Great Lakes state, Obama got zero. That's because his name wasn't even listed on the ballot. On Jan. 19, Michiganders had two choices: Clinton or "uncommitted." And while "uncommitted" earned about 45 percent of the vote, it's impossible to determine what portion of that bloc backed Obama and what portion backed John Edwards, whose name was also absent. Talk about fuzzy math.

Of course, Clinton doesn't really care about the numerical nitty-gritty.The point of emphasizing the popular vote--which, as I wrote yesterday, is impossible to count accurately, considering that several caucus states don't even keep track of it--isn't to settle on a mathematically sound tally and suggest that it should replace delegates as the proper metric for determining the Democratic nomination. Clinton knows that the rules won't change mid-game. But she also knows that neither she nor Obama can reach a delegate-majority on pledged delegates alone--which means that the superdelegates will inevitably have to put one of them over the top. Right now, they're breaking for Obama, who has an unshakable lead in the pledged delegate count; to do otherwise at this point would risk contradicting the "will of the people." But superdelegates are free to decide however they want; them's the rules, too. And if Clinton can convince these party poo-bahs that she's won the popular vote--even if it's a (necessarily) incomplete, imprecise or selective approximation--then maybe they'll consider her the "people's choice" and have some political cover for committing.

Or so the thinking goes. Yesterday on Air Hillary, aides originally added two caveats to their claim that Clinton was leading Obama in the popular vote: 1) that Florida and Michigan should count and 2) that the 12 caucus states should not. When a reporter accused them of "making up a metric," they checked their math--and discovered that (counting Florida and Michigan) Clinton was ahead by 12,000 even with the caucus states included. Which only proves my point. Team Clinton is perfectly willing to erase whole states to make their case; they're making up favorable ways to count the uncountable popular vote as they go along. In other words, it's not the math that matters. It's the mirage.