WHY CAN'T THEY JUST ALL GET ALONG? – AT 9:18 A.M. ET:  It's just so upsetting, this dispute between two people of such high character and integrity – Barack "hope and change" Obama and Hillary "I'm rich, deal with it" Clinton.  The Politico gives us the latest suds in the soap opera:

A split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was inevitable. Now that they’ve made peace, keeping it will be the challenge.

The Obama and Clinton camps tried to mend their differences Tuesday, but certain dynamics won’t be as easy to overcome in the months ahead as Clinton mulls a White House bid: Some advisers around both politicians have a hard time letting bygones be bygones. The press is determined to continue to dissect the relationship. And Obama and Clinton have genuinely different interests and instincts on some big questions facing the country.

The tiff began when, in an interview with The Atlantic, Clinton dissed the president’s foreign policy philosophy and called his early approach to Syria a “failure.”

White House aides then groused anonymously to The New York Times that Clinton was far more muted on areas of disagreement when she was actually serving in Obama’s Cabinet. And hours later, longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod escalated the situation, swiping at Clinton on Twitter for her Iraq war vote years ago.

By Tuesday afternoon, Clinton had called Obama as part of a very public attempt to kill the ugly headlines.

Obama aides and some Clinton allies downplayed the 72-hour episode with dismissive complaints about a voracious media that have been looking for fissures between the two camps since the 2008 Democratic primary, and both sides made it clear they wanted to move on.

“To me, this story is a classic August self-licking ice cream cone,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide who assisted Clinton with the rollout of her recent memoir, “Hard Choices.”

But the maneuvering nonetheless demonstrated how the Obama-Clinton alliance, long viewed as mutually beneficial, will be tested repeatedly.

COMMENT:  No, it's not a self-licking ice-cream cone.  Everyone knows that the Clintons are bitter at the Obamas over the way the latter wrecked Hillary in 2008, even suggesting that Bill Clinton had racist tendencies.  And everone knows that Obama appointed Clinton as secretary of state in accordance with the old wisdom of organized crime – "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."  He wanted her under his control.  Everyone also knows that Hillary is more hawkish than Obama, although that's not so hard to be.  The bar is so low.

Both Obama and Hillary are petty.  Obama's godlike status is much diminished.  Hillary has gone for the cash and the glory. 

Hillary has the harder job here – to distance herself from an unpopular president while keeping his base loyal to her.  It was pointed out at Fox this morning that Vice President Hubert Humphrey tried that while running for president in 1968, when he tried to distance himself from Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy, while keeping the Johnson voters.  He failed.  Neither the anti-war crowd nor the Johnson crowd wound up trusting him, and many stayed home on election day.  Nixon won.

August 13, 2014