On Face the Nation Sunday morning, Bill Richardson declared that whoever has the most delegates after Tuesday should be the nominee. Of course, this puts a great deal of pressure on Hillary Clinton to not only win all the states, but win them by large margins. Saying that Obama has "huge national momentum," Richardson said that we would be hurting the party to have a protracted race that lasted through April.
The one thing nobody is talking about is the gap in time between Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania. We would have nearly two months between Texas and the next race, and that could be damaging not only to our inevitable nominee, but also to our ability to raise funds for the general election. While I don't subscribe to the notion that the Republicans have some sort of head start on Democrats simply because they picked their nominee faster, there is a certain amount of truth to the idea of "coalescing" around a nominee.
Update:
If anyone watched meet the press, there was a great deal of talk about the delegate math being highly stacked in Obama's favor. The 11 state winning streak were not wins, but many of them were blowouts, and this elected delegate lead is nearly insurmountable. Carville basically stated that Hillary's entire plan is based around winning the final three major states, and using that momentum to carry her to victories in "firehouse caucuses" that would decide the Florida and Michigan delegates. Of course, if Hillary wins the final three big states, there will be tremendous pushback by the Obama campaign to have any sort of "redo" in those two states. He will likely be content to stick with the agreed upon DNC rules, and have a signigicant elected delegate lead going into the convention, and by then, all the superdelgates will be decided. Tuesday is going to decide it - whether Hillary wins or not. For all you Hillary people, unless she wins with 65%-35% margins - this will be over Wednesday afternoon.