The only person who can declare himself the nominee before then is presumptuous, at the very least.         And it certainly cannot be done by the media, even if the media person is as presumptuous as Tim Russett.

 We do not even know yet how many delegates will be credentialled to sit at the convention, pledged, super or otherwise.

And nobody even agrees on the number of delegates assumed to go for one candidate or the other. Different news services have different counts. The credentialing proces can last til August. Delegates won in Nevada by Clinton have been pushed out by Obama supporters at the state convention. Some delegates elected months ago now have buyers's remorse.(Considering what the election looked like four month ago, one can assume it could look a lot diffenert four months from now.)

There are serious unresloved issues of improper voting in several of the caucues so that delegates may be challenged in the credentials committee and some other issues challenged in the rules and Bylaws Committee.  And the results of the committee decisions can be appealed all the way to the floor of the convention for a convention vote.

So we will not know the number of votes needed by the nominee until August.  Any party leader who goes on TV and fails to correct press assumptions about the nomination does the party a disservice.  Any media person who pretends that this part of the RULZ is not a standard reality in rules for nominations in many organizations is misleading their viewers.

We should be spending the summer as a party working on trying to sort out all of the challenges, holding re votes or voter verifcation actions in questionable areas and trying to find justice in the ways we resolve them, no matter which candidate the resolutions favor. When the process can't be fixed, we need to adjust through committee on the side of fairness and justice.

 If the members and the voters see the party making a real honest effort to fix the things so  obviously unfair,  some of the damage done by the gross mishandling of the party leaders can be overcome before the election. Only then will the convention look to the country like something named after democracy.

We need to address the  talking heads and the people covering Senator Obama's Tuesday night announcement and claim, however he states them, so that they will not misrepresent his claim or its' validity or half of the primary voters will be outraged and the rank and file Democratic general election voters who have yet to name their choice will likely want nothing to do with us in the fall.
Thanks to some poor choices by the Obama people and the press, it is looking to more and more voters like Obama is not winning legitimately and like something is being stollen from Clinton.

If he is such a shoo in, why risk alienating so many voters by this boorish, bulling behavior. Where's the unifyier, the mathematical cinch, the most electible with the new coalition  governed by the new politics?

If he does this, he will have to ring less true to the lofty rhetoric, more arrogantly imperial and truely self-centered elitist with more and more of the people. If the Obama people are not concerned with how these choices portray Senator Obama, especially after the horrendous defeat in West Virginia and the Edwards upstaging fiasco, then the rest of us need to get concerned about why the Obama campaign needs to take such risks and has no room to behave in an admirable manner, more in keeping with the campaign rhetoric, the image they want to project of their candidate and their cause.

And why won't the Obama campaign  act in a less self-agrandizing, more legitimate way, less damaging to the party and our chances  to win the White House?  What is so frightening, so urgently looming that you can't behave more appropriately and more in character with a person who wants to be our Democrat in the White House...and wants the votes of all of the people it would take for you to get there.  This is unseemly and disturbing. It is costing the party in ways we can't measure until it is too late.

We need to contact all of the talking heads we can think of to try to set them straight about the real nomination process and our views of the coverage and quality of information.  And we need to contact Senator Obama's people and encourage them to think better of staging this ill-advised power grab Tuesday.

 Go ahead and campaign enthusiastically, but don't misbehave and hurt the party and our general election chances with these antics. Support a healthy contest that looks democratic.

A lot of us are very interested in a very strong down ticket in the Congress and state houses and issue votes.  We need to attract a strong turnout of enthusiastic support. We don't get that by employing behaviors that look to the voters like bullying, injustice and elitism.