Senator Barack Obama lost three out of the four contests yesterday, putting the brakes on his seemingly unstoppable momentum. Another case of Obama coming oh so close to snuffing out the Clinton candidacy (remember New Hampshire?) and yet failing to do so.

Soon after the losses, the Obama spin doctors were out to assure that, well, nothing’s really changed - unless you call a net gain of four to ten pledged delegates for Hillary Clinton a dent, which is what the Obama campaign is estimating Clinton took away last night. Per senior advisor, David Axelrod, “We went in with a very strong lead and we’re going out with a very strong lead. The only difference is that there are 370 more delegates that are off the board now.”

Even Obama himself said the wins are not all-important. “We feel that there’s a strong possibility that we gain substantially more delegates out of Wyoming and Mississippi than Sen Clinton gained last night – and so we will continue to build our delegate lead, we will continue to campaign in every state – we will not be cherry picking which states we deem important, because our attitude is every state is important, and by taking that approach, I’m pretty confident that we’re gonna end up with more delegates, having won more states, won more primaries, won more caucuses and have more of the popular vote.”

As for what’s next - Obama will take a few days off at his home in Chicago before heading out to campaign in Wyoming. He’ll also swing by Mississippi on Monday and then it will likely be all Pennsylvania all the time in anticipation of the delegate-rich state’s April 22nd contest. A big state that will be hard for Obama to win.

When a member of the press this morning compared the Keystone State to the Buckeye State, Obama noted, “Well, you know they said the same thing about Wisconsin and we won by 18 points, right? I mean, so every state is different. I don’t buy into this demographic argument.” He continued, “I think it’s very important not to somehow focus on a handful of states because the Clintons say that those states are important and the other states are unimportant. If we end up winning Mississippi and Wyoming - that’s important. If we end up winning North Carolina - that’s important. This notion that somehow the - all the states I win somehow are not bellwether states, but the states that sen Clinton wins - those are the critical ones - is you know is a strange way of keeping score and I don’t think it makes much sense.”

Obama Campaign Manager, David Plouffe estimates his candidate has a 136 pledged delegate lead after yesterday’s Potomac Primary wins. The Obama campaign has now won 21 contests (including 12 primaries) and, according to the campaign, has a 700,000 vote lead in terms of popular votes cast. “We couldn’t be in a stronger position right now, and the last really five days, we believe, will be looked at back at as a very decisive period in the nomination contest,” he declared. “We think it really put us on the path to the nomination.”

On a conference call with reporters, Plouffe said his candidate has the advantage. “We believe it’s next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close that pledged delegate count. The only way she could do it is winning most of the rest of the contests by 25 - 30 points. And we see not a single contest on the calendar left where we’d expect her to win by those kind of margins.” He later explained that they expect to benefit from a more relaxed primary schedule because “we believe anytime Senator Obama is able to spend time with voters in states, we have profited from that.”

The only way Senator Clinton could overcome this gap, Plouffe said, is if she wins both Texas and Ohio by “blowout” proportions - meaning a 20 point margin or greater as to win a large proportion of the delegates at stake. But Team Obama doesn’t expect that to happen - in fact, they plan on amassing more delegates themselves in both states. “At this point, even the most creative math, really does not get her ever back even in terms of pledged delegates,” Plouffe said, saying it would be “highly unlikely” that their pledged delegate lead will be eroded.

So does this mean victory or will superdelegates decide the Party’s nominee? “We believed all along that the pledged delegate leader will be the Democratic nominee of the party,” Plouffe stated. “I think there’s a growing chorus of concern out there that people do not think that superdelegates should overturn the result of the contests, so we have closed the gap with superdelegates, we’re continuing to try and attract support and we’ll continue to do that. But I think at the end of the day, if we head into June and we’ve won more states, more importantly we have a pledged delegate lead, you know at the end of the day, I think it’s much more likely than not that the superdelegates ratify that outcome,” Plouffe said.