Pressure grows on Clinton to quit

WASHINGTON – Hillary Rodham Clinton is coming under growing pressure from Democratic Party leaders and elected officials to quit the race, while some of her own supporters seem reluctant to rally behind her strategy for salvaging her presidential ambitions.

Intervening in the primary fight, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are sending public and private messages to superdelegates urging them to make a choice once voting ends Tuesday.

The push, which began this week, is damaging to Clinton, whose fading candidacy would be best served by prolonging the contest.

Clinton could use the time to press her case to superdelegates – the elected officials and other insiders whose votes will decide the nominee – that she is more electable than her front-running rival, Barack Obama. A delay also would improve the odds of a game-changing stumble on Obama’s part.

“Certainly time is our friend,” said one Clinton aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s strategy for defeating Obama. “As he has been in the public sphere and people have gotten a better look at him, they’ve grown increasingly skeptical, and you’ve seen Hillary perform increasingly better.”

The party’s leadership seems more intent on bringing the protracted nomination fight to an end, so that Democrats can pivot to the general election matchup with John McCain, who has been the presumed Republican nominee for months.

“We’re going to urge folks to make a decision quickly – next week,” Reid said in an interview with a radio program in his state of Nevada. “We agree there won’t be a fight at the convention.”

Pelosi told her hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, that if the nomination fight is not settled by the end of June, “I will step in” to resolve it.

The two top elected Democrats have been conferring with the party’s chief, Howard Dean, about how to close out the five-month nomination fight.

Clinton trails Obama by about 200 delegates, with just three primaries left – Puerto Rico on Sunday; South Dakota and Montana on Tuesday.

With her options running out, Clinton is hoping to revive her candidacy Saturday, when the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets to resolve a dispute over whether to seat the delegates from the Florida and Michigan primaries. But even some of her campaign supporters seem dubious about the position she has staked out.

Clinton won both contests in January. But because the two states violated party rules by holding the elections too early in the election season, the results were nullified.

The New York senator wants the elections to count. Her position is that she should be awarded all the delegates she would have gotten under ordinary circumstances.

Were that to happen, she would pick up as many as 111 more delegates than Obama. That’s not enough to overcome his lead, but it might narrow the gap to a point where she can tell superdelegates the race is close enough to hand her the nomination.

Some in her campaign circle are not sold on the argument.

Given that Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan, a compromise needs to be worked out that would assure him a certain number of delegates, these people said.

Under Clinton’s plan, she would pick up 73 elected delegates in Michigan, while 55 would be assigned to “uncommitted.” Her campaign has given no hint it is willing to bend.

Richard Schiffrin, a national finance co-chairman in the Clinton campaign, said a fair compromise might be splitting Michigan’s 128 elected delegates between the two candidates.

“I would support a compromise that is within a range of reasonableness,” Schiffrin said.

Alan Patricof, also a national finance chairman, said that when Michigan and Florida delegates are meted out, Obama can’t be the only one to sacrifice.

“Some accommodation has to be made to reflect what took place and so that both parties can walk away and feel justice prevailed,” Patricof said.

William Galston, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution and former member of the Clinton White House staff, said: “There’s only one kind of outcome that really makes sense here. The rules have to be adhered to or else the whole thing turns into a farce. There must be some punishment. The minimum punishment is the reduction of weight of their delegations by 50 percent.”