Clinton camp willing to go beyond June 3

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) senior advisers said Friday they are willing to push the nomination fight beyond the last contests on June 3 if neither candidate reaches the delegate requirement that includes Michigan and Florida.

While most analysts have determined that Clinton’s chances are all but nil, Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson, two of Clinton’s senior advisers, told a group of reporters over breakfast that if frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) does not reach 2,209 delegates by June 3, the campaign will continue.

{mosads}The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have been operating on the terms that the number of delegates needed to reach the nomination is 2,025.

“If neither of the candidates gets to 2,209, then the [nominating] process continues,” Wolfson said.

The advisers began the breakfast, which was sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, by continuing to push the electability argument, complete with data that suggest Clinton would be stronger in swing districts both as a general election candidate and as a coattails candidate for House members in tough districts.

However, the discussion moved quickly to the campaign’s resolve to continue to compete for the nomination even as Obama has signaled, following last Tuesday’s primaries, that he is moving into general election mode.

Garin acknowledged from the beginning that the campaign is “not oblivious to the environment in which we’re operating,” but he and Wolfson made it clear that Clinton has no intention of getting out of the race until the issue of how to treat delegates from Florida and Michigan is resolved.

“It is ridiculous to think that Florida and Michigan will not be resolved,” Garin said. “They’re going to be.”

Wolfson acknowledged after the breakfast that the campaign will have to push the “moral argument” that 100 percent of Florida’s and Michigan’s delegates must be seated for there to be a nominee.

But, for the first time, Wolfson said the campaign might be willing to cede the uncommitted voters in Michigan to Obama.

Michigan and Florida were both stripped of their delegates by the DNC for moving their primaries ahead of the approved window.

Clinton won both states despite the fact that neither candidate campaigned there and Obama’s name was not on the ballot in Michigan.

If the contest is not resolved by June 3, as Wolfson and Garin strongly hinted they do not think it will be, then the campaign would take on the shape of a general election campaign, Wolfson said.

Neither man would rule out taking the nomination fight to the convention.

The show of resolve came as yet another superdelegate who had supported Clinton moved to Obama’s camp, this time in the form of a Congressional Black Caucus member, Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.).

Wolfson said he does not “expect that there will be any others.”

Clinton’s chances at winning the nomination took a significant – and some would argue fatal – blow after Tuesday’s primaries, where Clinton lost in a landslide to Obama in North Carolina and narrowly edged the Illinois senator in Indiana.