Despite all these revelations and what they portend for Obama's electability, Democrats face two possibly insurmountable obstacles to dumping Obama: their purported commitment to small "d" democracy and the race issue.

We've heard them selectively bellyaching for eight years that "every vote must count." But has anyone ever stopped to notice that the very superdelegate system Democratic Party hacks devised was designed precisely to circumvent that principle? It's the best evidence since Democrats tried to disenfranchise military voters that they don't believe their own hype about counting every vote.

The superdelegate system was put into place to allow party bosses to manage just this kind of dilemma, where they discover late in the game -- after most votes have been cast already -- that their leading candidate might not be suitable or electable after all. The system would empower them to substitute their preferred candidate for the popularly chosen one.