We don't need Nader. We already have a Nader, a late convention, and those superdelegates.

There's a chance Hillary Clinton could win!

But it’s probably smaller than the chance that a continued slugfest will hand the White House to John McCain.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof does the math.  Clinton needs to win between 56% and 60% of all the primary votes between now and June -- a trick she's pulled off only in the Clintons' home state of Arkansas.  Hillary just doesn't have the wide win margins Obama has shown to have any hope of that.

Meanwhile, the big winner of the Democratic fist-fighting is Senator McCain. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 19 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. McCain in the general election if Mrs. Clinton were the nominee. More startling, 28 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would defect to Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama were the nominee.

Exit polls show the same trend. In South Carolina in January, about 70 percent of each candidate’s supporters said they would be happy if the other person ended up winning the nomination. By the Ohio and Texas primaries in March, fewer than half of each candidate’s supporters said they would be content with the other person as nominee.

And whose divisive, negative, dirty tricks campaigning has done that?  No matter how loudly you may protest, there is no equivalence between the two campaigns on that score.  Obama has come in a poor second to Clinton when it comes to a long-knives campaign. 

One Southern governor has proposed a solution.

“I’d love to have a Democratic president, but I’d also love to have a Democratic Congress. If you’ve got people mad and staying home, that can’t possibly help candidates running for the Senate, candidates running for House seats, and for the State Legislature.”

Mr. Bredesen is urging superdelegates (he’s one) to hold a primary in June, so that a winner would be chosen in time to begin a healing process before the convention.

Instead, the battle is getting bloodier. Mrs. Clinton spoke this week about the contest continuing for “the next three months” — and those would surely be a toxic three months. There’s already grumbling that Mrs. Clinton’s real strategy is to destroy Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the general election so that she can compete in 2012.

...Do the Clintons really want to risk becoming the Naders of 2008?

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It seems the Clintons have gotten so mad that nothing is going to persuade them.  But the wrangling within the party may finally sideline their hold on the machinery of power.  A couple of days ago Governor Bredesen and two Democratic strategists took part in a discussion (full text here) about the disposition of the super delegates and how to solve the problem of a close contest.  Bredesen is a super delegate who's urging fellow super delegates to declare sooner, well before the convention -- to put an end to the wrangling, managed to avoid declaring his own position. 

One thing seems certain:  sooner or later, the super delegates will be the deciders.  Here's the Rothenberg Report's Stuart Rothenberg:

Do you agree with Tad Devine, Stuart, that in fact the super delegates are going to make the choice?

Oh, yes, I think everybody agrees to that. There simply are not enough pledged delegates left to be chosen who will go one way or the other. If you had the Republican rules and it was winner take all in a state, that would change things. But you know that the two contestants, Senators Clinton and Obama, are each going to get a significant chunk of the vote of all the remaining primaries. They’re going to essentially divide up the delegates. Some will get more delegates and some will get fewer, but nobody’s going to get enough. And yes, the super delegates are going to decide it.

The fate of Michigan and Florida has evidently been decided, according to early morning reports today.  The DNC will not break its rules.  But could it pressure Clinton to step down?  Again, Stu Rothenberg:

I don’t think the DNC or Howard Dean, if Daniel means the chairman, wants to be seen as imposing its well on Democrats around the country. Millions of people have voted for both of these candidates. I think the DNC would rather the whole process play out. ... The process right now looks just simply too chaotic. People have said, “Oh, we’ve had these conventions years ago and there used to be convention fights. So this is just going back…” Well, the nature of conventions has changed. They’ve become public relations tools. And with the amount of media we have now with cable coverage and the reporters on this issue, I think it could be a real disaster if we don’t get this thing settled sometime in the next few months.