If Obama is the nominee, and it looks like he is a train that Clinton cannot stop, then I concur with E.J. Dionne here. Obama will be the Democrats Reagan and a man McCain and the Republican Party in their arrogance will continue to dismiss at their own peril. One difference, the criminal element, the win at all costs mentality of the current Republican Party cannot be dismissed by the Democratic Party. If they do, it will be at their own peril.

The frustration of the Clinton campaign is understandable. Like George H.W. Bush, whom Reagan defeated for the presidential nomination in 1980, Hillary Clinton has worked very hard, knows government from the inside out and would clearly provide the country with a safe set of hands. The Clintonites argue, fairly, that there is no way to know if Obama can live up to The Promise of Obama.

But the same was true of Ronald Reagan. In that 1980 speech, Reagan quoted a certain Democratic president who “told the generation of the Great Depression that it had a ‘rendezvous with destiny.’ I believe that this generation of Americans today has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Obama is being propelled by the same sense of historical opportunity, and that is why it will be hard to derail him.