…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Democratic nomination was going to end. And sure enough, the whimpering has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s article in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cornerstone of the new conventional wisdom about the race. Nagourney wrote that Hillary Clinton’s bid for the nomination “has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February.” But, he said, “that shot seems to have grown a little longer” this week, after it became clear that Florida and Michigan would not have do-over elections and clear as well that Jeremiah Wright was not going to be the candidacy-destroying disaster that Clinton needed him to be.

Later yesterday, Christopher Beam at Slate carved the flabby qualifications away from the core of Nagourney’s argument and stated the case against Clinton in much more stark language:

Clinton can win only by overturning Obama’s pledged delegate lead—a truism that still has not gotten the traction it deserves. Ominous warnings about 1968-like riots aside, the prospect that Clinton would accept the nomination over the head of the people is fundamentally at odds with everything the party represents…. Hillary’s path to the nomination is not “narrow.” It’s barricaded.

Now this morning, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen at Politico follow up with their own death certificate, whose lede reads: “One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.” And Mark Halperin adds his 14-point pile-on over at Time, which includes this thought: “She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.”

What to make of it all?

Given that Barack Obama started this week back on his heels after the media lynching* of Jeremiah Wright, you’d have to say this was a hell of a turnaround. And a person could be forgiven for wondering what caused that turnaround, especially since the week was noticeably free of the ordinary means by which we mark progress in the nomination horse race—namely, elections.

It would be nice to say that Obama’s speech on Tuesday caused the shift in media momentum. But good as that speech was for all kinds of reasons, in the immediate context of the nomination fight I suspect that it only one real effect: to convince the chattering classes, media and political alike, that his candidacy was not going to founder on the shoals of Trinity United Church of Christ. The best evidence of this is Chris Wallace’s appearance on FOX this morning (which was stunning not only because it suggested that Wallace does indeed have a conscience but also that he actually took the arguments of Obama’s Tuesday speech to heart).

I think it fair to say, however, that it was the failure of revote proposals in Michigan and Florida, and not the speech, that were really the final nails in the Clinton candidacy. (Which, to follow that metaphor out to its excruciating end, would make Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Obama today the first clod of dirt to begin the actual process of burial.)

I do think that this chain of events—the neutralization of the Wright threat, the end of the Florida and Michigan revotes, and Nagourney’s articles—adequately explain the fact that we’re suddenly reading so much about the end of Clinton. And yet they still seem too slight, especially since as recently as three days ago people were still talking as if we had a competitive race.

The electoral facts now are not substantially different than they were a month ago. But I think the real question to ask ourselves is not why the race is ending now, in the absence of any decisive events (no big election wins, no bloc superdelegate announcements), but why the nomination fight has gone on even this long.

Political reporters knew it was a very long shot, but for the last month they’ve indulged the Clinton camp’s assertion that events could conspire to get her the nomination. First, she would have to get big wins in Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which would give her a lead in the so-called popular vote. Second, this lead would have to be enough to convince superdelegates to defect en masse to Clinton’s side, perhaps assisted by continued fallout from the Wright flap or some other Obama scandal. Unlikely, everyone admitted, but not completely out of the range of possibility.

Politico’s Vandehei and Allen suggest some good reasons why the media were so willing to keep up the fiction of a competitive race:

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…. There are other forces also working to preserve the notion of a contest that is still up for grabs. One important, if subliminal, reason is self-interest. Reporters and editors love a close race—it’s more fun and it’s good for business. The media are also enamored of the almost mystical ability of the Clintons to work their way out of tight jams, as they have done for 16 years at the national level…. It’s also hard to overstate the role the talented Clinton camp plays in shaping the campaign narrative, first by subtly lowering the bar for the performance necessary to remain in the race, and then by keeping the focus on Obama’s relationships with a political fixer and a controversial pastor in Illinois.

Another reason, which Vandehei and Allen don’t mention, is the fit of media self-flagellation that took place in the aftermath of the Feb. 24 Saturday Night Live skit making fun of the respective treatment of Clinton and Obama. The anti-anti-Clinton backlash couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for Hillary, since it drew a week of sympathetic coverage in advance of the March 4 primaries. (Obama’s February successes may have also played a part in delaying his ultimate victory: for a few days there it was looking like he might be able to win Ohio, even though he’d been polling 20 points below Clinton just a three weeks earlier. When he didn’t win, some reporters, heartily encouraged by the Clinton campaign, pronounced the bloom to be officially off the rose.)

The hope now is that other superdelegates will follow quickly in Richardson’s steps and announce their support for Obama. I don’t imagine anything else would convince Hillary to drop out. And even that may not be enough: word from Slate’s Beam is that Clinton’s camp is now claiming that “Obama’s attempt to wrap up the nomination before Pennsylvania is tantamount to disenfranchising the remaining states.” Yes it’s ridiculous, but it speaks to just how out of touch the upper echelon of the Clinton campaign is with reality. Hillary Clinton or Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson may believe in their heart of hearts that anything but a Clinton nomination is an affront to democracy, civility, and good taste, but the rest of us don’t have to agree. It’s time to move on.

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NOTES:

* I use the word under advisement.