Hillary Clinton just sent me a “Dear Byron” letter.

You know what that means. It’s over.

She says she’ll be here in Washington on Friday, to hold a special event for people like me.

“I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Sen. Obama,” she says. “The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.”

I’m sure she means every word of it from the bottom of her heart, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to help.

But I am glad she stayed in it till the very end. Although I would never qualify as a Clinton supporter, I wondered why there were so many calls for her to drop out, beginning months before the primary season came to a close.

Yes, she was behind in pledged delegates and couldn’t catch up under any plausible scenario.

But it was very, very close — and Clinton continued to win state after state — big states — while Obama headed toward the nomination.

Which leads me to think of the immortal words of famous pathologist Dr. Henry Lee in the O.J. trial:
“Something wrong here.”

Not wrong as in corrupt, or in wrongdoing. Wrong as in screwed-up.

When was the last time there was a Democratic candidate who, in the race to win the nomination, lost California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Michigan and a number of other states?

And has there ever been a candidate who won by finishing so weakly?

Obama won by having a great 10-day stretch in February. After closing on Clinton in the Super Tuesday contests, he won everything in sight in the period between Feb. 9 and Feb. 19.

Victories in Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin were particularly lucrative — he won those states by a combined margin of 689,000 votes.

But since then — not so good. From Feb. 19 until the primaries ended June 3, Obama won just one major state, North Carolina. And he won big in just one other state, Mississippi.

Meanwhile, he lost Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, South Dakota and, just for good measure, Rhode Island.

Obama got by on the delegate edge he won in the caucus states. With a knowledge of the system that overwhelmed the supposedly savvy Clinton team, he got fewer votes, but more delegates.

And that is the heart of Obama’s victory. “Obama has won the Democratic nomination not because his voting coalition is larger than Clinton’s,” writes Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics. “As best we can tell, they are of equal size. Instead, Obama has won because his coalition is more efficient at producing delegates than Clinton’s coalition.”

Obama realized, as Clinton apparently did not, that he could win more delegates by winning the Idaho caucuses by 13,000 votes than she could by winning the New Jersey primary by 110,000 votes — even though there were a total of 21,000 Democrats who participated in Idaho as opposed to the more than 1 million who took part in New Jersey.

Thus, more efficiency — Obama got more bang for the buck out of virtually every small- and medium-sized state.

And some big ones, too. I said earlier than Clinton won Texas. In fact, she just won more votes than Obama in Texas. When the results of the state’s bizarre combination of primary and caucuses were sorted out, Obama got 99 delegates to Clinton’s 95. So in the race that matters — delegates to the convention — Obama won, although he had fewer votes.

So now we’re in the general-election campaign, and Obama will change strategy. When it comes to the Electoral College, each state is winner-take-all, and his small-is-better, Idaho/New Jersey strategy won’t work.

“Obama supporters need to recognize that their candidate is the victor not because he put together a majority coalition, but because he out-maneuvered Clinton,” Jay Cost concludes. “This was a highly intelligent strategy, but it was not a grand feat of majority building.”

Give Obama credit. He ran rings around the vaunted Clinton team. But now he’s got to come up with something new.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it