They say you can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep. First, Hillary Clinton's spokesperson Howard Wolfson took a job working for Fox News (where 88 percent of viewers voted for Bush in 2004), and now her former chief strategist Mark Penn is teaming up with true Bushie Karen Hughes.

Could you see one of Obama's main people going to work for the Bush gang? I think not.

Now that the race is over, there are a lot of posts of praise popping up about Hillary Clinton, and what her candidacy meant to a lot of people. There are also the inevitable what-ifs, how she could have won if she had only done this or that.

Too much of this is an exercise in mental gum chewing. This race was so close that you could point to almost anything that could have shifted the balance. If only Bill Clinton had stayed out of South Carolina, if Mark Penn had come down with the flu after Super Tuesday, if Hillary had picked up on the change mantra sooner, etc.

But perhaps her biggest mistake was relying on political calculation instead of her heart. That was where she got beat. By traditional political calculations, Obama should have waited before he made a serious run for president. He didn't, and that was all about heart.

Hillary should have run in 2004, when the country needed her. But she calculated that she would have a better chance in 2008. Think about where we would be if she had run. She would have been a much better candidate than John Kerry, and very well could have spared us from Bush's second term.

Her vote on the Iraq war was about political calculation. And it came back to bite her.

Her political calculations carried on in this campaign as well, positioning her as the presumptive nominee. She came off as phony, and left votes searching for someone with heart, passion. They found that in Obama.

It took losing to bring out the real Hillary. Hopefully she will gain something from this experience, and she will ditch calculations and instead follow her heart, take more chances, and show people she is a real person, not just a political machine.

Here is a very interesting article about what went wrong Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign for president.

It really is a sad story. She was so ill served by her staff that it's almost criminal. A couple of early staff changes and she would be the nominee right now, instead of hanging around waiting for Obama to get hit by lightning.

But it also points to the same flaw that we have seen with George Bush, in that she values loyalty over competence. Considering the political battles she has fought through the years, you can understand why she might lean on the loyalists more than a newcomer like Obama. But it sunk her.

Talk about cutting off one's nose to spite their face. Yes, there are women who are angry about sexist overtones that have pervaded this race. And there's no doubt that sexism has reared it ugly head in this campaign, as has racism. It shouldn't be happening, but it is, and both sides are hypersensitive to these kinds of remarks.

But to boycott the Democratic nominee? Ok, do they want John McCain to be president to make a point? This is the man who dumped his first wife because she was overweight and disfigured, and replaced her with a rich trophy wife who he called (a word that starts with "C" and rhymes with "hunt") in front of a bunch of reporters. How does letting McCain stack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade help their cause?

People on both sides of this nomination battle need to take a step back and realize they are on the same freaking team, and cut this crap out. Now.

In football, garbage time is a the period at the end of the game when one team has an insurmountable lead, the starters are on the bench taking a rest, and the coaches are already thinking about their next opponent. If the other team runs up some yards, so what. Garbage time touchdowns count in the stats book, but they don't get you to the playoffs.

Sen. Hillary Clinton won 67 percent in West Virginia tonight. Unlike her people, I'm not going to say that West Virginia doesn't count. It does. It looks like she will get 16 delegates out of the state, while Sen. Barack Obama will get seven. It's a big win for her after last week's loss in North Carolina, and a virtual tie in Indiana.

So she gained nine delegates tonight. Obama has claimed nearly 30 delegates since last week's primaries. His lead is even larger now than it was last week, and there are only five contests left. Hillary's win tonight simply ran more time off the clock, and Obama is that much closer to winning. MSNBC's Chuck Todd calculates that Hillary will have to win an astounding 91 percent of the vote in the remaining states to win.

The problem with this game is that it's really a scrimage, a battle between teammates trying to make the starting roster. Obama already has the starting job locked up, but Hillary is trying her damnedest to knock him out for the season.

What makes this different than football is that Hillary's team is trying to spin garbage time scoring into victory. It's not. The scoreboard still has Obama in the lead with time running out.

Let's also remember this is still a primary. The spin from the Clinton camp that Obama can't win "hard-working Americans, white Americans" is still just BS. Let's see, Obama won Idaho with 79 percent of the vote, Kansas with 74 percent and Nebraska with 68 percent. With those results, can't you make the argument that Hillary can't win the white vote?

Mitt Romney won Utah with 90 percent of the vote. Does that mean that John McCain won't be able to take Utah in November? Could Utah go Democrat? Not a chance.

IT'S A PRIMARY, PEOPLE! The whole game changes when it's Obama vs. McCain. New York voted for Hillary, but there's no chance it will vote Republican in the fall. Will Democrats vote for 100 more years of war in Iraq? Will women vote for the Republican who will stack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade? If the roles were reversed and Clinton was ahead, I'd be voting for her in November.

Obama wasn't my first choice of candidates, either. There are still doubts about his experience. But he has run a great campaign, kicked everyone's butts in every measurable way, and brought millions of new voters into the party. If Hillary is so much better, then why is she losing to an upstart like Obama?

There's a lot of hurt feelings out in Democratland right now. If Hillary wants to keep running to soothe her ego, then go ahead. But low blows against Obama at this point will only hurt the team. And having AFSCME and Emily's List spending money on a lost cause is money that can't be spent against McCain this fall. Whose team are you people on? Would you really want to see John McCain in the White House instead of Obama? If so, perhaps you should be looking at changing parties.

Carl Bernstein says that Hillary will keep fighting until she is offered the VP spot. Bernstein knows Clinton pretty well, and he has a lot of inside contacts.

I think Obama would do just about anything to not offer the VP spot to Hillary. Anything. Especially after her "hard-working Americans, white Americans" remark. Putting her on the ticket would infuriate too many Obama backers, unite all those GOP Hillary haters, and could make John McCain president.

There is too much bad blood between them now. Obama doens't want or need Hillary and Bill Clinton trying to seize the spotlight while he's running the country.

But what if, as Bernstein says, Hillary tries to force the issue? Obama will have to shoot her down while not alienating her base. To do that, he'll need to pick a VP who can heal this division.

I've always thought that Gov. Bill Richardson would be the best VP pick. He would deliver New Mexico for Obama, and make Texas, Colorado and Nevada competitive. And his resumé balances out Obama. But taking into account Clinton's moves, this might not work out.

Another person on the short list is Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebilius. Having a woman on the ticket might heal any rifts Obama has with women voters, and Sebilius can help Obama in the purple states by pulling in moderates. But she doesn't help him on foreign policy, which is McCain's only line of attack.

One way to help heal the rift with Clinton and help the ticket might be to pick Gen. Wesley Clark. He's an old Clinton friend, and his military experience will help counter attacks by McCain.

The wild card is Sen. Jim Webb. He would bring the military and executive experience, and he's a former Republican. And he has some skeletons in his closet in the form of sexist writings he did in the past that Hillary boosters might attack if they want to go kamikazi on Obama. Picking him would be a big FU to Hillary's people.

OK, so here's my odds list for VP:

• Clark: 2-1
• Richardson: 3-1
• Sebilius: 6-1
• Webb: 7-1
• Clinton: 10-1

Clinton supporter Paul Krugman had to get one more column in bashing Obama.

He starts out by conceding that the race is over. At least he can count. He then says to ignore early polls that say Sen. John McCain has a fighting chance to win, as polls this early in the process don't mean anything. But then he goes on to say Obama is in big trouble because the polls show he has "a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites" and that he can't win over white voters, that he is losing them 60-40.

As for the cause of this racial division, he says "But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was." Then he goes on to criticize Obama supporters for their "tirades" against Hillary. He also throws in the Clinton talking point about seating the delegates from Florida and Michigan.

Gee, there is so much wrong here its here it's hard to know where to start. If Krugman thinks seating Michigan and Florida are important, then maybe he should have said something about the Clinton campaign's rejection of the newest Michigan plan to seat all their delegates. Or, when talking about "tirades" fostering racial divisions, perhaps Krugman could have mentioned Hillary's statement that her "broad" base consists of "hard-working Americans, white Americans," or Bill Clinton's remarks in South Carolina.

I could also point out that if the tables were reversed and it was Clinton who had the lead in delegates, we could say that she would be in trouble since she is losing the black vote 90-10, a group she was winning 60-40 in the past. And Democrats can't win without black votes in November.

But the biggest trap Krugman falls into is trying to draw inferences from primary results and applying them to the general election.

Look at the GOP. A couple of months ago, hardcore conservatives like Rush Limbaugh were adamantly anti-McCain. Now they are actively campaigning for him. Why? Because there is no where else for them to go.

Blue-collar Democrats who voted for Hillary aren't likely to cross over for McCain. They don't want 100 years of war in Iraq and more of the same Bush policies. And women aren't about to elect a presidnet who puts another anti-abortion judge on the Supreme Court. They might disagree with Obama, but they'll still pull the lever for him in November.

Hopefully we have seen the last of Krugman's illogically Clinton boosting.

With Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign all but over, the postmortem analysis has begun. There are a lot of things to look at, but the one that sticks in my mind is her Bush-like tendency to surround herself with loyalists instead of people who are competent. At the top of that list is Mark Penn, the highest-paid campaign consultant this cycle. And what did he do to earn that money? Not alot:

As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don't get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she'd be the nominee.

Penn showed his stupidity throughout the campaign. The Clintons should ask for their money back. If Obama's main guy David Axelrod had been on Clinton's side, she'd be the nominee.

I know it's their job to try and spin a disaster as something great, but I'm getting really tired of this:

Senior strategist Geoff Garin called Sen. Hillary Clinton's narrow victory in Indiana "a close outcome but an outcome about which we feel very, very good." He said it was "he first time in this race that Sen. Clinton has come from behind to achieve a primary victory."

"These are two states we were supposed to lose," Wolfson said of Indiana and North Carolina.

Clinton was supposed to lose Indiana? Come from behind? Are you kidding me? There might have been one poll out of a dozen that showed her losing. Most of them had her winning by up to 10 points. Earlier polls showed her with even a bigger lead.

I'm waiting for the bolt of lightning to strike those who lie so blatantly. But worse, the media knows this is a lie, and no reporter challenged them on this point.

It's over for Hillary. She just lost the nomination. Sen. Obama outperformed the polls, trouncing Sen. Clinton in North Carolina and nearly upsetting her in Indiana.

There's not enough delegates at left for Clinton to overtake Obama, even if you throw in the disputed Florida and Michigan contests. Short of Obama getting hit by a meteorite, she's finished.

There are two scenarios that could play out here. One, that Clinton plays nice, raises a little money to pay off her debts, takes victory laps in Kentucky and West Virginia, and drops out on or shortly after May 20. That is when Obama will likely have the magic number of delegates to secure the nomination.

The other scenario is that she completely loses it and carries on with the "kitchen sink" campaign, making an already ugly primary season even worse, hoping to cause enough of a split in the party to possibly take the nomination at the convention.

Despite all the nastiness and BS coming from Clinton, I think she will eventually concede here. I would bet there will be a meeting between the Clintons and Obama sometime soon to work out some kind of deal so that Clinton retains some stake in the future.