Talk about a good soap opera. The clothes ain't much, but damn, the pissy eye scratching, the open feuds, and forget back stabbing, this gang is sinking the cutlery right into one anothers' chests.

The Clintonistas and the Obamamites? Nope. They've been perfectly chummy and adult. Very well-behaved. It's that MSNBC crowd. Who needs Big Brother 10 when we're trapped with this bunch? Not being a fan of Joe Scarborough, I missed his on-set meltdown the other morning, ripping into "colleague" David Shuster, who had the temerity to get confrontational with the ex-Republican congressman about Iraq policy—to the point that Scarborough was later quoted fuming about people with "hidden biases" on his network.

Then there was perpetually windblown Chris Matthews, a man never more than a half-second twitch from terminal spittle-flecked verbosity, getting PO'd at his co-host, Keith Olbermann, and Olbermann sandbagging Republican "analyst" Mike Murphy, who in fairness to Olbermann truly is a vacuous gas bag. (Murphy's assertion that Bill and Hillary would vote for McCain resulted in BOTH Matthews and Olbermann going after him last night.)

All in all, it's silly, juvenile, and very entertaining. The irony being that these people—these media professionals—were a significant faction of the crowd predicting Clinton-inspired chaos in Denver. They foresaw Bill and Hillary pouting and scheming and screwing things up so badly for Obama the whole DNC mob would leave home and start door-knocking for Ron Paul. Now, the stark contrast of the convention's reality to the laughably uninformed nattering of cable TV's political insider class has to be an improbable plus for Obama. How? I say anyone daft enough to believe anything said by anyone in the Blitzer-Scarborough-Matthews bubble world has to be thinking today, "Wow, all that went off pretty smooth. This act is under control."

The fact that it has, barring Bruce Springsteen endorsing Dick Cheney tonight from Invesco Field, is due in no small part to the Clintons, the unrivaled First Family of Political Soap Opera.

Bill Clinton last night was as adroit and pitch-perfect as you can get. It was Yo-Yo Ma with a TelePrompter. And was anyone surprised? Anyone?

My favorite Bill Clinton moment remains his 1999 State of the Union Address. Every drooling goober of the Hate Clinton Torch and Pitchfork Brigade, many of them sitting members of Congress and the major media, were assembled to watch him fold under the lights. Lewinsky, impeachment, twenty-four-seven 150-decibel nutbag radio shills, everyone was certain they had him . . . this time . . .finally. But instead of collapsing into a fetal tuck, Clinton stood up as though oblivious to the whole oceanic flow cutthroat bulls**t of and slammed the pack of them . . . with a flawless, high-minded, cool-as-a-fall-day address on the state of the union, which was, as the public knew (and he knew), pretty damn good at the time. Moreover, since Clinton knew how to read a poll, he knew the public was also inclined to believe the country would be even better off if the "loyal opposition" sitting out there in their upholstered leather seats, blood dripping from their fangs, would ever find time to do something more constructive than leave slime tracks around Capitol Hill.

Bill Clinton has no rival when it comes to the combination of reading the fluid dynamics of a political moment, the likely strategies of his worst enemies, and the mood of any room he happens to be speaking in. Which of course is a significant reason why opposition hacks despise him with such psychotic vigor. "It's all so calculated!" Uh, no duh. Politics is a game of reading and playing perpetually shifting strategies. Bill Clinton not only understands that, he has the native energy and intelligence to play it . . . effortlessly.

Hillary . . . mmm, not so much. As professional politicos go, she's good, and a LOT more human on the retail level than her most unhinged detractors ever give her credit for (a big mistake on their part, that she regularly exploits), but she is not and never will be the whole package that Bill is. Maybe it's the pant suits.

During the primary campaign, I often wondered what Bill was thinking in his most private moments. He had to be constantly thinking how he'd play a given moment differently but then snap back and remind himself that that wasn't the game du jour. Hlllary was the main act. He couldn't play it for her. At some point, following that logic, Bill Clinton had to recognize the fundamental gifts Barack Obama was bringing to the competition. Bill knows talent. So although he had no choice but to apply pit bull ferocity to Hillary's campaign—because that is what you do—he also had to know she was up against a force of nature, a once-in-a-lifetime package of political assets and that she was not going to win this one.

The Clintons love to win almost as much as they love to breathe. But it is preposterous for the feuding cable freak shows to assert with such certainty that they now prefer Obama to lose.

As they leave Denver, the Clintons, having said they whole-heartedly support Obama, are now going to have to prove it with a campaign effort so energetic, no one in the Democratic hierarchy has any doubt about their sincerity. Their political futures depend on them delivering the goods. More to the point, if they can deliver Hillary's Appalachian Catholic women (for lack of a better term), that discernable enough fact will place both Obama and the Democratic Party, for which Bill intends to play patriarch for at least another twenty years, in their ever-asting debt.

The Clintons love power, and indebtedness is power.