Indigent in Indianapolis: Hillary’s fate is up to Obama now

You could learn everything you needed to know about the suddenly transformed circumstances of the Clinton campaign from the face of Bill as he grimaced and fidgeted at Hillary’s side during her post-primary speech in Indianapolis last night. Cheeks flushed, eyes fixed and glazed at times as they stared wistfully into infinity, it was a mug that said the game is up. By the numbers, Hillary has had no chance to reach the convention with a delegate lead for a long time now. She only wanted a plausible pretext for staying in the race on the off chance that some catastrophe would befall Obama. And that required a continued show of momentum to underwrite her insistence that Obama is damaged goods and can only decline further from here.

Instead Obama followed his worst month of media floggings with one of his best primary showings, and this morning it seems all the air has gone out of Hillary in one great whoosh. This was a shock to the cable newsies watching it unfold, but not necessarily to the Clintons. Around 7 o’clock, Chris Matthews was asking Harold Ford whether Hillary had “the soul of a vice-president” as though it was the remotest possibility in the world. By midnight, network political consigliere Tim Russert had been authorized by an unnamed Clinton family capo to let the world know that yes, Hillary would be interested in the vice-presidency. Who besides  Russert could have believed otherwise? Hillary is not the type to stand on pride and personal animosity by sulking around the US Senate when she could be a botulin-tainted Christmas fruitcake away from the Oval Office.

Whether Obama wants to be the first president with a special Secret Service detail to protect him from his number two is the real question. The money stops now for Hillary, and in all likelihood that alone drives her from the race in the not-distant future. If she’s serious about angling for VP, you’ll see her putting away the slingshot and winding down with unity rhetoric of a sort that would have seemed unthinkable a week ago. Obama is unlikely to be moved by any public demonstration of good behavior, but he’ll have a harder time deciding if he can afford to let her out of his sight once she’s publicly vanquished.