The sound of inevitability seems to be rising out here on the blogosphere, driven by the Politico's admission that the Hillary Clinton campaign's only path to victory is to bang their fist on the table and demand that Clinton be nominated President of the Ohio River Valley, because Barack Obama's preacher scared a bunch of people in Youngstown and Johnstown and Charleston and so forth. Some, including our own commenter "Shock Mouse", have wondered why the superdelegates haven't risen up to end the nomination. There are a number of reasons that hasn't happened yet; Congress depends on the high-dollar donor base, which is loyal to Clinton; many of the remaining supers come from Blue Dog districts or the Mountain West and might not want to going on record endorsing either candidate; and it would look really really bad if they endorsed Obama en masse and Clinton proceeded to win seven of the ten remaining primaries. Now is not a convenient moment for the supers to end the race.
What they really need is an excuse to end it. There are basically two possible excuses left. An Obama win in Pennsylvania would end the big state/Ohio River Valley argument and suggest that Clinton can't get her delegate deficit close enough to force a "tie". Or, he could go two-for-two on the May 6th primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, ending Clinton's domination of Lower Midwest and likely leave Obama with a larger delegate lead than he has today, with only 211 delegates remaining. If neither of those things happen, we're almost certainly going all the way to the June 3 elections.
