Let's see which way this conversation goes, respectful comments = good.

More supers will jump after Tuesday when he gets the pledged (sans FL/MI) majority, but Clinton will stay in until PR, and then respectfully endorse Obama. 4-5 weeks later Obama reveals his VP, and if it isn't Clinton, she will publicly give her approval for the pick.

She may suspend her candidacy. That way she does not have to support him and she is still there for the convention.

sorry - what is the point of this diary?

your view:

Obama has shown that his campaign isn't foolish - look at where he recieved Edwards's endorsement.

my view

the timing of the Edwards endorsement was clearly designed to diminish HRC's victory--and its implications--in West Virginia, and to dismiss his own weaknesses. He attempts to link Edwards with the working class vote, as if it will magically give him that demographic, when Edwards actually does not give him that advantage.

I understand your point in the diary. I also understand that obama's "mission accomplished" statement is just one metric, an important one, in the nomination.  I will wait until the votes are cast at the convention, thank  you.

and George and Wolf and Keith and Gloria and David and Alez and Rachel and Sean and Bill and George and Candy and Tom and Brian and Shepherd and Contessa and Lawrence and Ben and Roland and Donna and all of the rest of the people on TV who will be teaching America over the next three days what's happening and what it means!

The RULZ of nominations are that as long as there are two or more candidates, the nominee is declared after the vote of the people elligible.

To win, the candidate needs one half, plus one, votes of the delegates credentialled to be seated at the conventions, cast by secret ballot, counted, recorded and confirmed by the Secretary of the Party in the presence of the delegation.  

The only person who can declare himself the nominee before then is presumptuous, at the very least.

 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.  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 with more and more people. If people are not concerned with how the choices portray Senator Obama, especially after 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 not act in a way less damaging to the party and our chances  to win the White House.