“I totally agree with David that [Hillary’s] chances are 5 percent or even less at this point. But if she wins Pennsylvania and wins Indiana, comes close in North Carolina, wins West Virginia, wins Kentucky, there are a lot of states later on which actually are quite good for her, wins Puerto Rico, then I think the chances are above 5 percent.”

– Peter Beinart, appearing on Meet the Press, March 30

“Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50 – 50 chance of living, though there’s only a 10 percent chance of that.”

– Ed, The Naked Gun, 1988

Hillary leads in most of the states Beinart mentions. Hillary is not fighting on because she likes the odds of a 1 in 20 chance that the superdelegates overrule the delegates. She’s fighting on because she can finish with some big wins, make Obama look so bloodied that he couldn’t win the nomination, and turn it closer to 50-50.

I also was surprised with the absolute credulity that Beinart, Brooks, and Russert greeted the WSJ/NBC poll — apparently it is now conventional wisdom that the revelations of the Jeremiah Wright sermons did not hurt Obama at all among independents and only minimally among white voters as a whole. (I suspect that when fifty percent of white voters tell a pollster they don’t recognize the name Jeremiah Wright or that they have no opinion on him, and another 20 percent say they have a “neutral” opinion on him, we’re seeing some variation of the Bradley/Wilder effect.

Let’s see how things shake out in Pennsylvania on April 22.