Clinton faces new pressure on 2 fronts

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 primary 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 by Obama.

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 the San Francisco Chronicle that if the nomination fight was not settled by the end of June, she would 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 party's Rules and Bylaws Committee meets to resolve a dispute over whether to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan. But even some of her supporters seem dubious about the position she has staked out.

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

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