The dust has settled from Indiana and North Carolina. Everybody's saying we made it back through the looking glass and now it's just a matter of observing the niceties to crown Barack Obama king of the disorganized Democratic tribe. But what of the Red Queen?

"Rats don’t swim toward sinking ships, and pols don’t back no losers, and this is why Hillary Clinton is in such trouble," wrote Politico's Roger Simon. Others on the site observed that Clinton's standing down of attacks on Obama and that "I will work for the Democratic nominee" comment indicate she's ready to lose gracefully.

She's not quite ready, apparently, to stop making the argument that she's got the white vote in her pocket, or that loaning her campaign more than $11 milllion in the past few months is somehow an indication of strength.

"Yankee fan go home," advised conservative columnist George Will, before dubbing Obama "the Democrats' Reagan". "Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits."

Lewis Carroll once described his Red Queen as a Fury whose "passion must be cold and calm - she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!"

I thought that description not so far off our political Red Queen. Which means that her exit from the race, when it comes, will be carefully orchestrated. What does she want to go quietly? Salon's Dan Conley posits it may be the right of choosing Obama's VP, repayment of some of the money she lent her campaign, and maybe a big role in a key campaign issue, such as healthcare.

Meanwhile, just days after Obama was considered on life support, he is getting the rock star treatment he enjoyed near the beginning of the primary season. On a superdelegate fishing expedition on the House floor yesterday, he was mobbed by pols.

Rush Limbaugh underscored that idea by attacking Obama as "the weakest" of the Democrat nominees. "He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote. But Democrats do not win with that.”

Limbaugh going after Obama is, I would say, a vote of confidence. Not that the campaign seems to need any more of that.