Barack Obama received another major asset in his campaign for the Democratic nomination, the endorsement of Governor Bill Richardson, casting into a yet more defined light the obvious character of this race: It is over, Obama has won, his nomination is inevitable.

For the reasons that Richardson, once a contender for the nomination himself, described, the inevitability is a good thing. It means a fresh approach to politics, a purgation of the Clinton-Bush venom and a brilliant, confident, capable leader. It means that, if that phenomenal energy can be extended to the general election and Obama’s para-partisan appeal once again cultivated before it’s too late, the outcome in November is nearly assured as a victory for him. It means Democratic success.

Yet the Clinton campaign’s refusal to recognize the inevitability, or to accept it, means just the opposite. It means corroding the internal cohesion of the Democratic Party with acid infighting. It means bashing down the golden candidate of Obama until his misshapen stance no longer resembles his positive message and finds him bent far, far below McCain in the polls. It means giving the Republicans time to cohere into a mighty bloc, armed, funded and coordinated to put the candidate who, by all indications, makes Bush look like an internationalist, in office.

Perhaps most tragic, it means that Obama is demanded to depart from his politics of positivity in order to combat the relentless negativity of the Clinton campaign. He is compelled to engage Clinton and shake her from her mighty base in Pennsylvania, a powerful redoubt of her support, and to do so in a manner that does not entirely undercut his denunciation of the politics of division. In essence, it promises an ugly, clumsy chapter in what is rapidly turning from a dream for the Dems into a horror story.

The chief problem faced by the Democratic party - by the nation - is that horror stories sell big. The longer the media can write about it, the longer they will pretend that Clinton has an ice cube’s chance in Hell of winning and extend the contest into a chain of breathless moments broken by commercial breaks. She has no chance, unless the superdelegate constituency bails en masse on an African-American candidate and thereby betrays what could be regarded as the core voting bloc of the Party. All indications are trending in the opposite directions - Obama is racking more superdelegates by the day. Instead, the media would have us believe that “The Fighter,” as TIME magazine dubbed her, could somehow scrap her way up to be the Queen of the Hill. In doing so, they cheerfully gut the Democratic party - a crime the Democrats themselves are largely complicit in - with the same blithe aplomb that they led us to Iraq with.

As an astute article in Politico puts it:

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

One reason is fear of embarrassment. In its zeal to avoid predictive reporting of the sort that embarrassed journalists in New Hampshire, the media — including Politico — have tended to avoid zeroing in on the tough math Clinton faces.

Of all the issues the media is currently mishandling, it is this one that is most egregious and most critical. Until the media is forced to call the fight, they will perpetuate the myth of a possible Clinton victory in order to splash blood in the water so that they can rake in the ducets from the feeding frenzy.

Sadly for us, there is only one group that can effectively band together to make the press wake up and smell the inevitable: The Democrats themselves. Judging their track record on doing the same - the Gore candidacy, the Kerry candidacy, the conduct of the 2007 Congress - we have only slightly better chances of them doing the right thing than Clinton has of emerging the victory in Denver.