Democratic party "insiders," according to Robert Novak, want Clinton out. Now.
... Some of the same Democrats who short months ago were heralding her as the "perfect" candidate now call her a sure loser against McCain, saying she would do the party a favor by just leaving.
Clinton's tipping point may have come when it was announced that her $5 million loan to her campaign came from a fund she shares with Bill Clinton. That puts into play for the general election business deals by the former president that transformed him from an indigent to a multimillionaire and might excite interest in their income tax returns, which the Clintons refuse to release. The prospect impels many Democratic insiders to pray for the clear Obama victories on March 4 that they hope will make it unnecessary for anybody to beg Hillary Clinton to end her failed campaign.
Walter Shapiro gets into the rationale for intervention on the part of super delegates. Their role, he writes, shouldn't make Obama's supporters paranoid.
The logic behind the existence of superdelegates is that if someone has to step in to resolve a deadlock, it probably should be those with the most stake in the future of the party. [Elaine] Kamarck, a former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore and an at-large member of the DNC who has endorsed Clinton, said, "The only way that the superdelegates really will come into play is in a situation where it can be argued that for some reason the voters did not decide -- and they essentially produced a tie. The definition of that tie can be all over the place. It could be someone having the lead in actual primary votes but being behind in pledged delegates.
Virtually the only scenario left for Clinton to create such a tie is by winning pretty much every major primary (Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina) remaining on the Democratic calendar. Even then, due to the Democrats' rules mandating proportional representation, she probably would not catch up to Obama in pledged delegates. (CNN's tally gives Obama a 142-delegate lead from the primaries and caucuses.) But if Clinton ended the primaries with a closing kick, she would have other arguments in her favor based on having won a majority of the national popular vote and having carried every major state in the nation aside from Obama's home of Illinois.
He concludes:
If Democratic voters end up evenly divided between Obama and Clinton, the buck has to stop somewhere. And since the purpose of a political party is to win elections, it makes sense ... to decide whom they would rather run with at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Or party leaders could rethink their system. The way the party leadership handled rule-breaking on the part of two major states -- Florida and Michigan -- is not reassuring.
