After superdelegate James Clyburn endorsed Barack Obama late yesterday, the media apparently decided that the Democratic primary came to a close — even though South Dakota and Montana still have primaries today. Terry McAuliffe lashed out today at the notion that the race is over and especially that Obama has the numbers to win outright already. He tells Meredith Viera this morning that Hillary Clinton has no intention of conceding:

This curious push to get Hillary out of the race with just days to go seems rather desperate on the part of the Democrats. The Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting this weekend exemplifies this, with its strange sense of timing. Why did they rush to hold this meeting on Florida and Michigan with the end of the primaries in sight? A solution afterwards could have been less provocative and perhaps reached without the divisiveness that the Democrats fueled, especially with the manner in which it split the Michigan delegates.

Now everyone wants to pretend that Obama has “won” enough delegates to clinch the nomination, but it’s simply not true. Neither candidate can clinch this nomination without the superdelegates, and those cannot be won or even completely claimed until the convention’s first ballot. The rules allow them to change their minds at any time, and so only the pledged delegates can be reliably counted before then. If Hillary chooses to wait until the convention to concede, she is certainly within the rules to do so, and Howard Dean is violating the rules by forcing superdelegates to explicitly commit beforehand.

It’s pretty unseemly, but it’s the Democratic Party.

My predictions for tonight: Hillary wins both South Dakota and Montana, but the latter within 3 points.