Personally, I've known Obama was going to be the nominee for a long time.  I've known since his 17 point win in Wisconsin.  Hillary Clinton just could not win the remaining states by the margin she needed to make up for the drubbing she took all through February.

So why did the race go on?  Superdelegates.  The presence of superdelegates means that out of the 2025 of 2209 or whatever number of delegates you need to clinch, 800 of them are always in doubt.  It makes the candidate who's winning seem much further away than they are.  And they in fact are further away, because the superdelegates can in theory vote for whomever they want, and as long as that possibility exists, we have a race.

But it was an illusory possibility.  The majority of superdelegates who were ever going to declare for Hillary Clinton did so before a single vote was cast.  And in fact, she's holding fairly steady with what she had prior to Super Tuesday.  And the remaining superdelegates have no intention of flouting the voters' will, even if it makes 49% of them happy - EVEN IF THEY THINK THEY'LL BE VOTING FOR THE BETTER CANDIDATE.  They not only have an election to win, they have a party to hold together.

How would it look for them to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton because she does well with white voters?  It would be like saying to black people, without which the Democratic Party is basically the Green party, "Sorry, but your candidate can't win.  We love it when you vote for us, but we're not going to count you this time - please be a good Democrat though and continue to support us and our endless rolodex of milquetoast candidates."

So it was a question of if they were going to declare for Obama, not when.  They couldn't declare before Texas and Ohio, because those were two huge states with tremendous national interest.  Then they couldn't declare afterwards, because Hillary Clinton won them both.  (Just not by enough).  Then they couldn't declare after Wyoming and Mississippi, because Pennsylvania was coming up - and nothing was going to stop her from winning there.  How would it look for them to declare Obama the nominee, and then for Hillary Clinton to win a big state immediately afterwards?

They can declare now.  (And seriously, fuck West Virginia and Kentucky.  Hillary Clinton can't carry either.  Bill Clinton couldn't even carry Kentucky.)

Update: While I'm being (rightly) taken to task for claiming that Bill Clinton lost Kentucky in 96 when he actually won it, I don't think I'm wrong in my larger point. To quote johnnygunn, which in no way should be taken to mean that he endorses the content of this diary:

Mostly - Was mostly correct. West Virginia is less and less likely to be in the Dem column. Underground coal mining is disappearing - the source of strong union Dems. It is being replaced by mountaintop removal that employs far fewer and often nonunionized workers. What you end up with is an economically distressed region with an Upper South culture that is highly susceptible to Republican "cultural" bugaboos.