Hillary’s speech on the night of her squeaker of a win in Indiana was pure chutzpah. Before the vote was even tallied — and while it was still too close to call for CNN — she announced she’d won the “tie-breaker” (even though she had already lost so badly in North Carolina that, even with her small margin in Indiana, she emerged from Tuesday’s primaries further behind).

It was Obama who once called Indiana a tie-breaker vote, back before the Pennsylvania primary, Hillary and her campaign staff kept reminding people. But that doesn’t change the math. Obama is now so far ahead, and with no more big states like North Carolina on the horizon, that it is hard to imagine a scenario that puts Hillary in position to be the nominee.

Still, she is determined to keep going to the bitter end.

The scenario the Clinton campaign needs to win is a big do-over that will completely change the results of the race so far: going back to the nullified primaries in Florida and Michigan.

Hillary got the crowd in Indiana chanting “count the votes!” and strongly implied there was something corrupt about sticking with the DNC rules that nullified the Florida and Michigan primary results and forbade the candidates from campaigning there. Remember that Hillary held a victory party after the Florida vote, and Obama wasn’t even on the Michigan ballot.

So, not surprisingly, Hillary declares that “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by forty-eight states.” And the inimitable Lanny Davis went so far as to declare that it takes 2,209 delegates to win the nomination “if two states are not disenfranchised.” Davis also predicted a massive outpouring of money for the cash-strapped Clinton campaign would follow her “great victory” in Indiana.

The theme of disenfranchisement was taken up immediately by none other than Rush Limbaugh, who was blathering on the radio about the need for Justice Department investigations of the corrupt Democratic primary process. In particular, Rush fumed, Latinos are losing a voice because Florida is left out.

When Hillary and Rush are reading from the same playbook, watch out.

The Republicans love the Democrats’ train wreck primary because it is draining enthusiasm from the base, and distracting attention from the disastrous Bush administration and the seriously compromised McCain campaign. The longer it goes on the better, from Limbaugh’s point of view.

He even ratcheted up the rhetoric a couple of notches for Hillary, calling Howard Dean the “Barry Goldwater” of the Democratic Party. Obama supporters like John Kerry are from the “Goldwater wing” of the Democratic Party, Rush opined, calling the canceling of Florida and Michigan the greatest act of voter suppression since the 1960s.

Hillary might consider an ad starring Rush Limbaugh — the champion of Latinos, disenfranchised voters, and staunch opponent of segregation — speaking up for the voting rights of minorities against the race-baiting, elitist Obama campaign.

It makes about as much sense as Hillary’s “populist” call for a gas tax holiday, which every economist in America calls bunk, and which she recycled, badly, in her Indiana pseudo-victory speech. “You feel invisible when you’re filling up your gas tank,” she told the crowd. Huh?

Never mind that Hillary’s summer gas tax holiday — which John McCain proposed first — will likely do nothing to ease gas prices, let alone make the forgotten working class suddenly visible again.

Forget logic, when a campaign goes into “kitchen sink” mode, it means throwing everything you can at getting elected. Expect some pretty peculiar looking arguments.

That said, there is no doubt that cutting Florida and Michigan out of the process was a seriously dumb move by the DNC. If the two states moved their primaries too early, they would be punished, the DNC warned. They ignored the warning, and now the party that thought it would be a shoo-in for the White House this year is punishing itself as a result. An early compromise could have saved the Democrats a lot of heartache.

On May 31, there will be a DNC Rules Committee meeting to try to figure out the Florida and Michigan mess. Clearing it up before the very end of the primary season would have been a much better idea. In that, Rush Limbaugh is right: Howard Dean screwed up.

But if you want to see a whole lot of invisible and disenfranchised Democratic voters make themselves heard very, very clearly, watch what happens if the Clinton campaign tries to use 11th-hour rule changes to overturn the winner of both the popular vote and delegates — the first viable African American candidate for the presidency.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor for The Progressive magazine. Conniff is a regular on PBS’s To the Contrary. She also has appeared frequently on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and on NPR and Pacifica radio. © 2008 The Progressive