The Field says the "nightmare ticket" is dead thanks in no small part to Bill Clinton's over-aggressive push for it.

It's not Bill Clinton's party anymore. A lot has happened since 2000: the Dean campaign's small-donor-fueled 2004 run, Dean's winning the chairmanship of the DNC, and now Obama's mega small-donor-fueled campaign. New people are in charge with power-bases equal to or greater than Bill Clinton's.

Add to these power-structure changes what happened in 1996. The Clinton administration's triangulation strategy, and Bill's unwillingness to spread the money around and campaign hard for Congressional Democrats that year left a lot of quietly-disgruntled party regulars. The "Gephardt/Daschle" Congressional wing especially doesn't think of Bill Clinton as a team player (and this Congressional wing is ascendant in the Obama campaign). So, Bill Clinton is being shut out now that he's not vital to the party's prospects.

As Townes Van Zandt sang, "you are not needed now."