Clinton campaign 'slowing down'

Barack Obama plans to spend election night in St. Paul, Minn., where Republicans will hold their convention, but Clinton intends to return home to New York. Her campaign has scheduled no events beyond a speech Wednesday morning in Washington. Clinton aides considered and rejected a plan to have her campaign later this week in states that will be important in the general election.

She isn't withdrawing, a Clinton aide said, "but we're slowing down this process."

With voters in South Dakota and Montana set to end the five-month primary season, Clinton campaigned as if it were any other day, but her husband telegraphed that the race might be wrapping up.

"This may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind," former President Clinton said in Milbank, S.D. "I thought I was out of politics, till Hillary decided to run. But it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to go around and campaign for her for president."

Obama, campaigning in Michigan, a state both parties will contest in the fall, said he talked to Sen. Clinton on Sunday "and told her that once the dust settled, I was looking forward to meeting with her at a time and place of her choosing."

Clinton and Obama both picked up superdelegates Monday. Obama was 41.5 delegates shy of the 2,118 needed to clinch the nomination, and Clinton was 200.5 away, according to the Associated Press tally.

In a significant gain for Obama, Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an influential African American voice, told the Associated Press that he would soon endorse the Illinois senator, who seeks to be the nation's first black president.

Though the Clinton campaign seemed poised to enter a more subdued phase, it did not seem on the verge of going out of business. In a conference call with top donors Monday, campaign officials Harold M. Ickes, Jonathan Mantz and others appealed to them to stick with her.

They said she wasn't "going to take forever to make a decision" on whether to quit the race, according to a Clinton fundraiser who took part in the call. Like others interviewed, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign.