Now all we have to deal with is four to eight years of "My friends" every other sentence

Poor Chris Matthews. His MSNBC contract's up later this year, and right in the middle of his show tonight he was preempted by David Gregory breaking the news that Hillary Clinton will quit the race and endorse Senator Obama Friday, or Saturday, or both.



But as far as not feeling the love goes, it's striking how much changes in 18 hours or so. After the she-Clinton's graceless non-concession last night, and her hacks rolling out petitions to force her onto the ticket as veep, and arguing she needed as much as a fortnight to consider her position, rest, get a facial, maybe do a spa treatment, practice some new zen koans and depressurize, 23 members of the House and eight members of the Senate got on the horn with her today and told it it's game, set, match.

You have to stretch to think of a candidate with such a tin ear. Her main asset- the people who have voted for her- is a wasting asset. Not all 18 million of them are sitting around like robots on Doctor Who waiting for the instructions to invade planet Earth. The longer she took to compose herself, the fewer there were likely to be of them.

And as a practical matter, it's hard for your hacks to argue you should be vice president when you haven't yet admitted you're not going to be president, as Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz found out today.

It's a measure of how smart the Obama campaign is that before the she-Clinton's come to Jesus moments this afternoon, Senator Obama announced his vice presidential selection team: Jim Johnson, whose experience goes back to 1984; Eric Holder, a former US Attorney, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of the late president. That's a team not to be rolled, not even by The Clintons' legendary sense of entitlement. Call Waldo an old cynic, but it's hard to imagine Hillary making the case to Caroline Kennedy that invoking her uncle's assassination as a reason to stay in the race will be endearing.

By making clear before lunch what the vetting standards for veep candidates will be, Obama sent a big shell across The Clintons' bow: you're not getting a free ride. Wanna force your way on the ticket? The price of admission to the game is the sort of disclosures everyone else will have to make, and that The Clintons don't want to: where the $500m came from for his library; how they made their hundred million dollar fortune so fast; whether there are more stained dresses waiting to be collected from the cleaners. Putting the Big Dog on a choke chain measure in angstroms, and pre-qualifying every word out of his mouth including 'a', 'and' and 'the.'

It's a nice irony, that at the end of it all, Hillary Clinton's improbable two-for-one but one above all argument will founder on greed. But at least for a while we will be shed of the endless psychodrama that is Life With The Clintons.

On the other hand, as was the case in Time Bandits, there may yet be a few lost, burning coals of Evil lurking.