Ruthless as in, Hillary reminds me of Rasputin. (Which I'm sure Big Sven here would consider a compliment.)

But this does remind me of a recent E.J. Dionne column:

Yet if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

Pat Robertson won the GOP caucus in 1988, then his people refused to seat the GOP's version of superdelegates at the state convention. In effect, the religious right completely booted out elected GOP officials from the nomination process.

So those officials led the fight for the initiative that brought us a primary, as a way to check the power of the Robertson supporters. The Democrats never wanted a primary, and have gone back and forth on how many delegates are assigned through it.

The problem this year is that the DNC has a rule prohibiting any primaries or caucuses before February 2 except for Iowa, NH, Nevada, and SC. Because our mail-in voting system does not require voters to state an approved reason for getting a mail-in ballot, it's not considered an absentee system, and the DNC considers the election to be the date ballots are mailed out in early January.

If the state party went ahead with assigning any amount of delegates via the primary, ALL of our delegates would be invalidated, as happened with Michigan and Florida. The state party had no choice but to ignore the primary.