Howard Dean: SuperDelegates need to decide now

If this isn't a reaction to last night's debate debacle, I don't know what is.

An increasingly firm Howard Dean told CNN again Thursday that he needs superdelegates to say who they’re for – and “I need them to say who they’re for starting now.”

“We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time,” the Democratic National Committee Chairman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We’ve got to know who our nominee is.”

Dean clearly wasn't happy with what he saw last night. It's no longer just Hillary using right-wing talking points in an effort to destroy the guy who will be running against McCain in the fall, now the mainstream media has bought into the "let's destroy Obama" game. As Ben Smith notes, this is the first time the mainstream media has delved into the William Ayers issue, one of the many below-the-belt zingers that Hillary has been trying to throw at Obama:

Barack Obama took his first public grilling on his relationship with Bill Ayers last night, and between the moderators' pressing and Clinton's follow-up, it had exactly the effect the Clinton campaign hoped: finally injecting the issue into the public discussion.

At the moment, "Ayers" is the fifth most searched term on Google, according to Google Trends; "Ayers Obama" is 15th. "William Ayers" is 26th.

ABC, with Hillary's help, has now made yet another right-wing talking point a legitimate point of public debate about Obama. If this keeps up, every Swift Boat style attack against Obama will be considered a serious issue by the media, all because Hillary made it so. Dean has, in my opinion, had enough. He's watching Hillary's kamikaze attack on Obama metastasize into a media feeding frenzy against the guy who won our nomination two months ago. Hillary isn't going to win, Dean knows it, we all know it. The only question is whether she's going to take all of us down with her. Howard Dean is apparently now, finally, belatedly, saying "no."

Get ready for the Hillary donors to once again threaten to destroy our majority in the Congress, and help John McCain become president, if Hillary's divine right of kings isn't honored.

ABC may have just ended Hillary's run for the presidency.

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