While Team Obama quietly goes about the task of assembling a list of potential VP candidates, Team Clinton goes about the task of sabotaging Barack Obama’s general election campaign against John McBush:

Given that sentiment, how Obama treats Clinton — and vice versa — is likely to have as much impact on any final settlement between the camps as the final vote tallies. Jesse Jackson, who knows a thing or two about waging a long and bitter primary battle — and about reconciling when it is over — said recently, “The winner really needs the loser.” But then he added that unless the loser gets over the “pain” of coming in second, the party is doomed. Nothing is more likely to bring the loser’s supporters aboard than seeing their candidate throw herself wholeheartedly behind the winner. On the other hand, when the postprimary relationship doesn’t gel — Democrats remember how excruciating it was to see Jimmy Carter practically chasing Ted Kennedy across the stage to grab his hand at the 1980 convention in New York City — it can be fatal.

That message has been received by Obama. He stopped short of claiming the nomination after the Oregon primary on May 20. In his speech that night in Des Moines, Iowa, he praised Clinton’s “courage and her commitment” and added, “Some may see the millions and millions of votes cast for each of us as evidence that our party is divided. But I see it as proof we have never been more … united.” When he praised Clinton for helping to shatter barriers in politics that had long held women back, he was using phrases that were very close to those that had been suggested by several Clinton-camp followers. One measure of Obama’s desire for peace will be whether he ignores objections from some of his most stalwart backers and helps Clinton pay off her $20 million-plus campaign debt, either by headlining events on her behalf or by appealing to his donors to help her. There is an urgency to this task: she has only until late August to raise the cash from donors to repay herself more than $11 million she has personally loaned her campaign.

Dismiss me as a misogynist. Of course I am; isn’t everyone who’s capable of criticizing Hillary’s blatant underhandedness and historical revisionism? Team Clinton’s now portraying Hillary as the valiant warrior, struggling to right the historical moral wrong done to each and every Democratic voter in Florida and Michigan, stealthily, under cover of darkness, by Obama personally, who singlehandedly stole every ballot and now would force all of them back into slavery, picking cotton on Obama’s plantation.

Next she’ll be breaking out the mournful old Cracker spirituals that they sang to remind each other of a better time, before they were kidnapped from their homes in Scotland and England by the hateful African traders and sold into captivity in Dearborn, Motown, Palm Beach and Disneyworld.

Oh, but this is only about pursuing superdelegates. Simple, unbiased and objective Democratic folk, like Steve Geller of Florida.

Well looky there, Barack Obama did him dirty by not inviting him to lunch and begging for his vote. So now Steve Geller’s joined the crusade to fix the dirty deal Obama done to him, apparently oblivious that he was caught on video when he mocked the DNC’s sanctions while pretending to want to change the primary date.

As Josh Marshall notes:

For the last week it’s seemed that Sens. Clinton and Obama were adhering to their tacit truce, continuing the primary campaign but avoiding the harsh exchanges that make later party unity a dimmer and dimmer prospect. Clinton particularly had deescalated her rhetoric. Then we have a speech like Sen. Clinton’s yesterday in Florida in which she compared the controversy over seating the Florida and Michigan delegates to the Florida recount debacle and many of the great voting and civil rights battles of the 20th century. She is of course also claiming that whatever the delegate count, she leads in the popular vote and that that is what really counts. Never mind of course that even if you count Michigan and Florida she’s still not ahead in the popular vote without resorting to tendentious methods of counting.

I’ve always assumed, as I think most people have, that once the nomination is settled the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated. And I can see if Sen. Clinton wants to embrace this issue to claim a moral victory even while coming short of her goal of the nomination. As things currently stand, seating them would still leave Sen. Clinton behind in delegates.

But Sen. Clinton is doing much more than this. She is embarking on a gambit that is uncertain in its result and simply breathtaking in its cynicism.

I know many TPM Readers believe there is a deep moral and political issue at stake in the need to seat these delegations. I don’t see it the same way. But I’m not here to say they’re wrong and I’m right. It’s a subjective question and I respect that many people think this. What I’m quite confident about is that Sen. Clinton and her top advisors don’t see it that way.

Why do I think that? For a number of reasons. One of her most senior advisors, Harold Ickes, was on the DNC committee that voted to sanction Florida and Michigan by not including their delegates. Her campaign completely signed off on sanctions after that. And Clinton was actually quoted saying the Michigan contest didn’t count. Michigan and Florida were sanctioned because they ignored the rules the DNC had set down for running this year’s nomination process.

The evidence is simply overwhelming that Sen. Clinton didn’t think this was a problem at all — until it became a vehicle to provide a rationale for her continued campaign.

That would be this Harold Ickes. He voted for the sanctions. Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Dodd and Biden pulled their names off the ballot “And Clinton was actually quoted saying the Michigan contest didn’t count”. And now Clinton and Ickes are revealing the truth of the matter: only votes FOR HER in Michigan count. The votes of all the people that didn’t want her, Kucinich and Gravel don’t count at all.

They can’t dance around that anymore: she’s trying to disenfranchise Michigan voters. Even after the DNC Rules Committee meets on May 31st and seats that delegation with some lesser penalty, she’s going to spin even that as a penalty imposed by Howard Dean and Barack Obama because they hate women and Floridians and everyone in Michigan, even though her righthand guy Harold Ickes and other Hillary supporters voted for the same sanctions she’s now comparing to great historical wrongs.

I guess she tried it but never inhaled. She seeks to be eligible for the military after getting a draft deferment. She’s opposed to NAFTA after speaking publicly for it. And she recalls how she came under sniper fire when she landed in Bosnia.

None of my critique has a single thing to do with her gender. It has to do with the methods both Clintons employ. They want to be on both sides, whenever it’s advantageous only to themselves. They are hardly the first politicians to do that. But Obama stole nothing from them, he’s stolen nothing from anyone in Florida and Michigan. He played by the rules, will retain a clear lead in pledged delegates and in superdelegates when the last primary’s done, and Clinton’s current effort would be akin to losing the Electoral College vote to McCain and claiming only the popular vote should count, after excluding the popular vote in a few small states McCain won.

We’re not in Kansas, Dorothy, nor Zimbabwe, nor Selma. Trying to rewrite the rules or trying to force your way onto the ballot as Vice President, by stirring up anti-Obama sentiment in Florida and Michigan and among all the demographics stubbornly refusing to support Obama in November can only be called what it is: sabotage.

So Caesar should appoint Brutus as his understudy, and invite the Clintons over to a unity dinner when Bill Clinton knows where the knife drawer is?

To be perfectly objective, Clinton’s not only willing to see Obama lose in November if he doesn’t knuckle under to her brass knuckle charade. She’s willing to sacrifice her chances to ever become president herself, except to inherit the job as Vice President. And, per usual, the deadly impact on our troops, and the deaths of thousands of more Iraqis - certainties if McCain wins - is also a sacrifice she’s willing to make to get things suitable for her.

Some call it ‘hardball politics’. I call it unconscionable, considering that she joined a minority of Democrats in Congress to permit the war then made herself distinctly stand out as the only Dem presidential candidate not to apologize for that vote.

She claims to be about unity, but in practice, what I see in her wake are dead people. And Obama and his majority of voters are merely fresh meat she’ll nobly be willing to sacrifice for the high moral virtue of breaking the rules, the party and the real lives of thousands of people, for the sole gain of Hillary.

I don’t oppose her because she’s a woman. I oppose her because she’s a Republican in tone, temperament, strategy and deadliness.

And SUSA demonstrated today that there’s other beneficial pairings that can win Republican states for Obama. And remember, Bill Clinton never won Virginia, winnining leass than 41% and less than 46%, respectively.

I’m sure the uncommitted superdelegates are paying attention and can be counted on to vote for whatever’s best for the country. Happily, the majority have their priorities in order.