Yes,

we are in deep, deep shit, and this post expresses my view perfectly:

I have seldom in my life ever so deeply and devoutly wished I were wrong. I really hate having to say what I shall say below.

I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I like Barack Obama a lot. Hillary Clinton is a brilliant, likeable, good-hearted woman with good ideas and experience that, although it can be poked fun at, may actually be relevant to doing the job to which she aspires. Barack Obama is a brilliant, likeable, good-hearted man with an eloquence and charisma that is hard to top in today's environment, with more and better experience than he's often credited for and a lot of ideas that might be forged into effective policy that this country really needs.

I am genuinely undecided between the two. If I had to vote in a primary before our convention (which I might -- Florida's situation remains in flux), I honestly don't know which line on my ballot I would mark.

But have a belief bordering on certainty that if either of these two very fine public servants is chosen to become our candidate for president, on January 20, 2009, we will be inaugurating John McCain as our next president, and that this will be an absolute disaster for America and for the world.

We have so many Democrats in public life who would win this election in a walk. Al Gore is the most obvious of these, but John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson would also be shoo-ins if we could only place their names onto the ballot in November, and there may be others as well whose names have not even entered into the public's consciousness of this race (examples: Ron Wyden, Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer, and more). But instead we are left with only two candidates standing, and they are the only two at real risk -- VERY real risk, FRIGHTENINGLY real risk -- of losing the election.

How did we come to this? It certainly isn't a case of moving too far to the left -- these two were perhaps the philosophically rightmost of our entire beginning field of candidates. And it certainly isn't that we don't have anybody better.

No, I believe it's something else. Our party has, to its eternal credit, always been the party of the oppressed, of the downtrodden, of minorities, women, workers, and the poor. Sometimes we stray from providing the kinds of support "We the People" need in this evolving world, but generally we Democrats have been the party of The People and the party of justice and equity.

In this role we have sometimes developed competing factions for slices of a finite pie. These factions have sophisticated organizations of their own that wield tremendous power within the Democratic Party, both in its officialdom and apparatus and in its rank-and-file support. Two of the three most major of these are blacks and women (the other is labor).

We have one black candidate and he is clearly receiving overwhelming support from the black community. We have one woman candidate and her support from women is nearly impregnable.

This denied our other candidates support they might normally have received from these constituencies. Our black candidate, however, is so eloquent and attractive that he has also taken much support from women, but the female candidate has (inexplicably, in my view) taken the support of labor away from its strongest champion at the start of this race, John Edwards.

This left precious little else for our more traditional (read "white male") and more experienced candidates to divide among themselves. And so, one by one, their campaigns were starved for resources and for votes, and they dropped out, leaving only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, genuine stars among their own constituencies, but neither of whose appeal may be sufficiently broad to prevail in November. Furthermore, both carry significant baggage that the Republicans, particularly through their immensely well-funded 527 efforts but also through their official candidate and party campaigns, will be able to exploit to pander to fear and spread slander throughout the months leading up to the election.

We are not helped by the increasingly nasty head-to-head bickering that's going on between Clinton and Obama right now. The airplay this despicable pastor is receiving is wounding Obama, not among his supporters within our party but with general election voters who will remember it in the fall. And Hillary Clinton is appearing more and more petulant and nasty in her attacks, attacks that build lasting resentment among constituencies we will badly need in the fall.

I believe that we will lose the election if either of these two become our candidate. I give us a chance no better than 20% to win against John McCain with either, maybe slightly better with Hillary than with Obama but a loss by any margin remains a loss, as we discovered in 2000. I know polls paint a different picture right now, but check on the polls (and compare the turnouts between the Democratic and Republican primaries) at this point in 1988 and I think you may see how accurately such early polls and statistics reflect the eventual outcome of the election.

We need to pick somebody else. The apparent deadlock toward which we are heading gives us an opportunity, however unlikely, to do so. I know the chances are very, very small, growing smaller by the actions of some Edwards delegates to switch over to Obama yesterday, but it is a straw to which I will continue to grasp, because I feel strongly that if I let go, we may all fall into an abyss.

And make no mistake about it, "President John McCain" is an abyss from which we may never climb out.