Obama beat them, and didn't need them to win. The punditariat clamored for Obama to beg Bill for his support, they trashed Bill for failing to deliver it lustily enough, and they fretted over whether Obama would underperform in the areas in which Hillary became an extremely unlikely working class hero. Then Obama won, handily, with barely any help from Bill and Hil, which was Bill's greatest fear, because Obama doesn't look to his presidency as a model for success, he looks to Reagan. The Clinton era: over. It'll barely register in the history books.
We feel bad saying it, actually, because Bill is an incredibly gifted and skilled politician (we've seen him work a room, he's superhuman) and he meant well but his presidency, while on the whole a slight success, was kind of a mess. The economy was stewarded well and foreign policy was mostly responsible. But it also set up the Republican Revolution and devolved into a surreal farce that took up the entirety of 1998 and drove everyone mad and exacerbated the culture wars and led right to eight years of Bush, sort of.
And for a while, it looked like Clinton's greatest legacy would be his political acumen and his new and improved centrist DLC, the organization that would provide the keys to the next Democratic victory. Well. In 2000 they got out-lawyered in Florida, in 2004 they couldn't eke out a slim victory from a divided elctorate, in the in 2008 primaries Hillary got beat, handily, by a charismatic nobody with a slim record.
Come the general election, Obama went with a modified version of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy, expanding the map instead of focusing on two or three battlegrounds at any cost. He didn't reach out to Bill in any real way and didn't bitch when Bill didn't reach out to him. There's probably not room for Bill or Hillary in his cabinet, as much as a Bill Clinton Supreme Court nomination would be hilarious.
And this means, basically, that the Clinton era has ended. He shoved the party to the right, yes, but it remains to be seen how long that rightward shift will last in a nation that might be trending left, economically at least.
It's kinda sad, really, but Bill does still have his private jets full of models. All Hillary gets is her stupid Senate seat she didn't even want.
Once upon a time 
