A bit of subject-changing damage control post-Wright, but true enough. The media’s pretending that the race is close because it gives them something to write about and we’re pretending it’s close because it prolongs the bloodsport and gives Hillary a chance to weaken him with attacks conservatives lack the Absolute Moral Authority to make, but the math is what it is. She’d need 60% of the delegates in every primary the rest of the way — including do-overs in Florida and Michigan, which ain’t happening — to barely overtake him. Her own advisors put her chances at 10%. Unless it turns out he was Client Number 10 in that Spitzer hooker ring, the one and only chance she has is to blow him out in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana, thereby proving that the Wright thing has effectively destroyed him for the general. Anything short of that and we’re rid of her forever.

I shall shed no tears.

[E]ven some of Clinton’s own advisers now concede that she cannot win unless Obama is hit by a political meteor. Something that merely undermines him won’t be enough. It would have to be some development that essentially disqualifies him…

To foster doubt about Obama, Clinton supporters are using a whisper and pressure campaign to make an 11th-hour argument to party insiders that he would be a weak candidate in November despite his superior standing at the moment.

“All she has left is the electability argument,” a Democratic official said. “It’s all wrapped around: Is there something that makes him ultimately unelectable?”

But the audience for that argument, the superdelegates, will not easily overturn the will of the party’s voters. And in fact, a number of heavyweight Democrats are looking at the landscape and laying the groundwork to dissuade Clinton from trying to overturn the will of the party rank and file.

The exit question that will be asked forever: Why didn’t she push the Wright stuff sooner? If you believe, as most of us do, that the Clintons’ highest moral principle is accumulating political power then logically she should have dropped this to stop the bleeding when he was blowing her out in primary after primary last month. It would have risked a backlash among black voters, particularly given the hackles raised over some of BJ’s choicer remarks in South Carolina, but a good Machiavellian like her surely prefers a risky strategy for victory to a safe strategy for defeat. Can it be that she held off because she really is concerned about racial polarization within the party, even if it means ruining her chances to achieve her life’s ambition? Our Hillary?