FiveThirtyEight has a thoroughly persuasive analysis of Hillary Clinton’s nomination prospects, and they are beyond dismal. In fact, they prove that the whole question about Florida and Michigan is “much ado about nothing”:

If Florida and Michigan are not seated, Obama has effectively already clinched under this scenario. We have him picking up 41 pledged delegates and 23 add-on delegates between now and the 23rd, or 64 total, slightly more than the 60 he needs even without any further superdelegate endorsements. But even under Clinton’s best-case Michigan/Florida scenario, with the delegations fully seated, Obama will need only 1-2 superdelegate commitments per day to clinch by June 21.

The very last line in the table might be the one to pay the most attention to. If the Florida and Michigan delegations are seated as half-delegates, Obama needs only about 10 percent of the outstanding superdelegates in order to clinch the nomination; Clinton would need 90 percent. If Florida and Michigan are fully seated, Obama needs about 20 percent of the remaining undeclared delegates; Clinton needs roughly 80 percent.

If there is no prospect for success in pressing the Florida/Michgan question all the way ot the convention, the question then is: What can possibly explain Hillary’s continued dogged and even outright hysterical rhetorical pressing?

One common explanation is that Hillary is trying to force her way on to the VP ticket by accumulating enough votes to put party elites at her side to bend Obama to her will. But the blunt reason that Obama won’t do it is Bill Clinton. It would be bad enough to have and endlessly scheming Hillary in the VP office — wags have facetiously suggested that Obama would require a veritable army of food tasters. But the addition of former president Bill Clinton — an ex-president who has never fully accepted the “ex-” part of that title — would constitute a second competing power center in the West Wing. The Obama administration would be fractured irreparably into not two but three parts from day one. Only a willingness to embrace the inevitability of a stunted and ineffective administration would drive Obama to accept such a scenario and there is no evidence that he is stupid enough not to see the set-up.  Even Clinton’s own advisers have reportedly concluded that Obama will not in fact offer Clinton the VP spot.

FiveThirtyEight highlights a more likely alternative: That the Clinton campaign has long since stopped being motivated by calculation and has become nothing more than a tantrum:

Increasingly, I am beginning to side with Jonathan Chait: we should stop trying to interpret the Clintons’ actions as those of a rational campaign. This is not just about Florida and Michigan. It’s about kindergate and Jesse Jackson and “hard working” and a whole series of actions that were at best politically tone-deaf and at worst almost willfully self-destructive. The story of the Clintons is not that of a campaign that will debase itself in order to win. Rather, it’s one of a campaign whose sense of self-pride had become so swollen as to obscure its path to victory.