In the wake of Hillary Clinton's primary victories in Ohio and Texas, the race for the Democratic nomination looks like it will drag on for seven more weeks -- at least until the voters in Pennsylvania have their say -- and probably longer.

The delegate math suggests deadlock: While it is highly unlikely that Clinton can catch- p to Barack Obama in terms of elected delegates, it is equally improbable that Obama can secure the 2,025 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination outright. So much of the attention in the past 48 hours has turned toward the superdelegates, those somewhat mysterious 796 Democratic Party officials and insiders who are free to vote as they please. And that prospect makes Robert D. Putnam very concerned. 

Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard and the author of Bowling Alone, says we are witnessing "the sharpest increase in civic engagement among American youth in at least a half-century, portending a remarkable revitalization of American democracy." But all of that promise might be dashed "if the decision rendered by millions of ordinary Americans could be overturned by a backroom deal among political insiders."

He continues: 

The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.

Putnam believes that if the election were decided by superdelegates, the corrosive message that "civic engagement is for suckers" would be sent to the young people -- a "new Greatest Generation" -- who have been energized by this campaign.

"So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them," Putnam writes, "let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy."