For several weeks now, Hillary Clinton's only conceivable path to the nomination involved securing a favorable deal for seating the Michigan and Florida delegations. Now that John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama, however, even that path has disappeared.

To understand why it has disappeared, let's take a step backward and review the situation. Clinton's goal is to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations according to the January primaries, with each delegate counting as one vote. If that happens, the biggest question will be what to do with the 55 uncommitted Michigan delegates.

On election day, 40% of Michigan voters chose uncommitted. Of those, 77% favored Obama and 19% favored Edwards. Since virtually all uncommitted voters were either Obama or Edwards supporters, now that Edwards has endorsed Obama, there's really no fair argument to deny Obama those 55 delegates.

Consequently, even if Clinton secures a full recognition of the Michigan and Florida delegations, Barack Obama will receive 55 delegates from Michigan as well as Edwards' 13 delegates from Florida. Even if Obama didn't have those 68 delegates, the Michigan/Florida gambit probably wouldn't have been enough to give Clinton the nomination. But now he will have those delegates, effectively ending any chance Clinton has at the nomination -- even with the Michigan/Florida gambit. Here's the numbers:

As you can see, there's nothing fancy with these numbers. The projections for the remaining five contests are conservative, giving Hillary Clinton a net gain of 5 delegates.

Still, even if with these conservative assumptions, when add up the total delegates for each candidate and you look at the delegates remaining, Barack Obama would need barely more than 1 in 5 delegates to officially nail down the nomination.

There's just no way Hillary Clinton will get 78% of the remaining delegates -- and that's what she needs under her best case scenario.

Even if Obama bleeds away a few Edwards delegates to Clinton (say 5), the numbers don't change significantly.

So yes, it's true: we can finally start waving goodbye to the nomination battle.