Stop the presses: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has predicted today that the race for the Democratic nomination will be over in a matter of days.

“By this time next week, it’ll be all over, give or take a day,” Reid told an audience at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, where he was promoting his new book.

OK, so it’s not exactly headline news. But what is news is that Reid and his House counterpart Nancy Pelosi will be doing some arm-twisting between now and then to get superdelegates to go public to seal the deal for Barack Obama.

All this smacks of smoke-filled rooms and party hacks-the remnants of machine politics the Democrats have been eschewing since 1968.  The party has been endlessly re-writing its rules ever since, trying to come up with the perfect formula to keep its many disparate interest groups from tearing each other apart.  The very idea of awarding a portion of state delegates on a proportional basis was hatched in 1988 to try to appease Jesse Jackson.

Apparently Democrats never imagined that one day they’d face a situation where two viable candidates would emerge from the very interest groups for whom they’d carved out token representation.