While it looks like Barack Obama is preparing to make peace with Hillary Clinton in the interests of party unity, the same cannot be said of the soon-to-be-former candidate’s husband:

WASHINGTON – The Obama camp is preparing to embrace Hillary Clinton enthusiastically – but they’re reaching for the 10-foot pole to keep her rabid husband at bay. Bill Clinton’s erratic and increasingly sulfuric behavior on the campaign trail has perplexed senior Barack Obama campaign officials trying to figure out how to deploy him in the fall campaign. While the former President’s political skills are extraordinary, some senior Democratic and Obama officials – and Hillary Clinton aides – believe he is now simply too toxic to be a high-profile surrogate. “Before all the controversy there were plenty of things he could have done, but he’s definitely a liability now,” a Democratic operative with close ties to Obama Nation told the Daily News. “She will campaign her heart out and be a huge asset for Obama,” the source predicted. “But he needs to just stay out of it.” (…) “He could have been a great attack dog on [John] McCain,” the source lamented. “He was rehabilitated, a total rock star, leader of the Democratic Party and an elder statesman. All of that is gone. There’s a lot of consensus on that in the party.”

As Joe Gandelman notes, the fact that Bill Clinton has essentially turned into political poison to the extent that he probably helped ruin his wife’s chances of being the first woman to occupy the Oval Office is completely his own fault:

He remains idolized by many Democratic partisans, but his political stock with many Democrats has gone down due to his behavior in the primaries. He remains anathema to many Republicans. But while most ex-Presidents see their image grow once they leave office as they become symbolic of the office of the Presidency, Bill Clinton morphed into becoming one more strident, spinning member of a political machine — someone more like a screaming guest on Sean Hannity’s show than an ex President.

In fact, of Alan Colmes ever wanted to retire, Slick Willie would seem to make a perfect sparring partner for a loud mouth like Hannity, but that’s beside the point.

One of the still unanswered questions of Campaign 2008 is why Bill Clinton behaved the way that he did. When the campaign started in January, there was the stuff in South Carolina and the testiness when cornered about the campaign’s efforts to lower voter turnout in the Nevada Caucus. Then, amazingly, Clinton continued to play his own game even when it became clear that he was hurting his wife’s campaign. In April, just when the kerfuffle over Hillary’s Bosnia Lie had died down, Bill resurrected it. Then, just as the campaign in Pennsylvania was winding down, Slick Willie railed about the unfairness of a primary process that had pretty much been designed before the election on the assumption that Hillary would win, and then played the race card again and denied doing it. Even in May, when any chance of winning was pretty much slipping away, Bill was heckling the hecklers and pretty much making an ass of himself. Then finally, he started claiming that there were vast left wing conspiracies against his wife.

And then, finally, it seems as if he finally went completely over the top in the final hours of the campaign:

On Monday night, the Clintons flew back to New York after a long day of campaigning in South Dakota, a state she would win on the day Obama clinched the nomination. On the plane ride home, they sat in the front row, and no one dared talk to them. One aide said the tension in the front cabin — visible to reporters in the back — was painful to endure. Another member of the inner circle described Bill Clinton as coming “unhinged” in the final hours, raising his voice in phone calls with superdelegates, constantly revisiting his wife’s options for staying in the race. “He keeps asking me, ‘What about so-and-so? What about so-and-so?’ ” the supporter recalled, saying the former president wanted constant updates on superdelegate moves.

The theories that have been tossed out there range from the idea that Clinton craved the spotlight so much that he would do anything to make sure people paid attention to him instead of his wife, to the idea that he really didn’t want Hillary to win and was subtly sabotaging the campaign, to the idea that his open heart surgery back in 2001 had somehow changed his personality.

Whatever the explanation might be, one thing is clear; the Bill Clinton who was President from 1993-2001 and was, like him or not, a master politician, was nowhere to be seen on the campaign trial. Instead we saw a man who either had no political skills whatsoever or who has such deep psychological issues that he would think that playing the race card against a black candidate would actually help his wife in a race for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President.

Keeping him off the campaign bus for the next five months may be the smartest thing Barack Obama could do.