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The Clintons blustered and bellowed, moaned and groaned, and cried all sorts of foul, but at the end of the day the DNC Rules Committee did not give them what they wanted. Their votes on Michigan and Florida showed that there is a new leader of the party, and his name is Barack Obama.

From the get-go it was unlikely that Hillary Clinton was going to get her way with the Rules Committee. She wanted all the delegates to be seated based on the results of the two primaries that were held in violation of Democratic Party rules. Clinton tried everything from threatening a bloody convention fight to claiming that voters in the two states were being disenfranchised.

In the end, none of it worked. Barack Obama will officially clinch the Democratic nomination sometime between Wednesday and Friday of next week, but history may show that the Hillary Clinton campaign ended today.

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The Clinton favored proposal to seat the Florida delegates in full based on the results of the primary lost by a committee vote of 12-15. The Florida proposal that passed awarded Clinton 105 delegates to 67 for Obama, with each delegate getting half a vote at the convention. In Michigan, Clinton had insisted that she be given 72 delegates to 55 for Obama. The proposal passed by the committee by a vote of 19-8 awarded 69 delegates to Clinton and 59 to Obama, with each delegate receiving half a vote at the convention.

The total number of delegates needed for Obama to win the nomination is now 2,118. After picking up 32 delegates in Michigan and 36 in Florida, Obama now has 2,052 delegates and is 66 delegates short of the nomination.

There was a time only one short year ago when Hillary and Bill Clinton controlled the machinery of the Democratic Party. With three votes today, the DNC Rules Committee passed that control to Barack Obama and a new generation of Democrats. The era of the Clintons is over. Today, a new generation of leadership has taken over.