Two thoughtful TPM readers make pleas for calm as the Obama / Clinton fight to the death moves forward.
Here is the gist,

This
talk of mortal peril for the Democrats is crazy. The idea that where
the primary stands here in March jeopardizes the outcome of the
election in November strikes me as wildly ahistorical. And I say that
as an Obama supporter who believes that Hillary should have gotten out
of the race a month ago when the central premise of her campaign became
the proposition that superdelegates should overrule the outcome of
contested primary elections.

Didn't Bill Clinton have to fight
primary battles well into May and June? He managed to beat an incumbent
President a six months laters. Didn't George W. Bush have to contend
with John McCain in 2000 even after Al Gore had basically finished off
Bill Bradley early in New Hampshire? Didn't Jimmy Carter manage to beat
Ford despite Jerry Brown winning a string of late primaries in 1976?

Of
course those readers are correct to point out that we are only in March
and concern today that the Obama / Clinton fight will spoil November is
very premature. Yes, the Clintons in 92 had to beat back Brown into
June. But this misses the point.

So what happens in June? The
Clintons have no intention of ever stopping until the delegates
nominate them or reject them in Denver (feel free to make the case that
I’m wrong about this -- nothing would please me more!).

The proper analogy is not 92, but 80 when Teddy Kennedy
took his losing battle to the convention and broke the party. The
Clintons are planning their floor fight now and not really being very
shy about it. It was as recently as this week that Hillary pointed out
again that no delegate is pledged – how many times has Harold Ickes reminded us of this fact. Harold Ickes – Teddy Kennedy’s floor manager in 1980.

There
is good reason to be very concerned if this fight goes past early June.
The 8 weeks between the Democratic convention at the end of August and
the November election  is not enough time for the bloodied nominee to
run a general campaign and beat back McCain.  And there is no reason to
believe this will end in June.



The biggest problem facing the Democratic party is a leadership vacuum
exacerbated by the losers being the Clintons. Who is going to tell the
former president in June to STFU and bow out gracefully?

To borrow the Bush/Cheney 2004 re-election theme, “be afraid, be very afraid”.