WASHINGTON — Tuesday's voting in Indiana and North Carolina put Hillary Rodham Clinton no closer to overtaking Barack Obama on the path to the Democratic presidential nomination. That now leaves Clinton with one overriding task: to make the path longer.
For most of the year, June 3 beckoned as the end of an exhausting nominating calendar, the day that the final states hold primaries to choose between Clinton and Obama. But now, Clinton is preparing to push the contest beyond the voting phase of the process and into the realm of committee meetings and credentialing rules, where her campaign believes she may have a chance to overtake Obama before the party's nominating convention in late August.
For voters who are weary of the contest -- and for the growing number of Democratic leaders who say the ongoing duel is damaging the party -- Clinton's course means continued uncertainty over whether the party can unify to focus on beating presumed Republican nominee John McCain.
Tuesday's voting all but ensured that Clinton, who shows no signs of giving up and vowed in her Indiana victory speech to go "full speed on to the White House," will now try to lengthen the nominating process.
She failed to come up with the dual victories she needed to raise doubts that Obama could beat McCain this fall. As a result, she will find it harder to make a case for the Democratic superdelegates, whose votes will probably provide the margin of victory to whoever wins the nomination, to rally around her.
In fact, Clinton's chance to overtake Obama in the number of elected delegates probably disappeared with her lopsided loss in North Carolina. And to overtake Obama in the popular vote, she would probably have had to post a large margin of victory in Indiana.
That is why Clinton in the last day has begun talking about raising the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination -- in essence, moving the goal line in the nominating process.
Under current Democratic rules, a candidate needs 2,024 delegates to win the nomination, and Obama emerged from Tuesday's voting less than 200 delegates from that goal.
But Clinton has started to argue that 2,209 delegates are needed to win.
Her claim is that the party should seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of participating in the nomination fight as punishment for moving their primary election dates earlier than allowed. That argument, of course, benefits Clinton, who won both states handily and would win a large share of their combined 366 delegates, allowing her to dig into Obama's lead.
