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Hillary Clinton has her days numbered

Hillary Clinton is still raising bucks and wearing out her campaign pedometer in her effort to become the Democratic presidential nominee, but even her own campaign is acknowledging that her days are numbered.

A columnist at The Huffington Post reported Thursday that a senior campaign official and Clinton confidante said a Democratic nominee will be chosen by June 15. Barack Obama’s campaign, meanwhile, announced its plan to declare victory on May 20, after he wraps up a majority of the pledged delegates in the Democratic nominating process.

Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe on Thursday compared the nomination process to Game 7 of the World Series. He said the game needs to play out, and voters are the ones to decide. But he told morning news shows that he doesn’t think the nomination process will drag on until the convention.

In fact, it will all be over “within a week or two after” June 3, he said.

Clinton told donors Wednesday night at a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser that netted her about $500,000, “I am staying in this race.” Telling them she’s been counted out before, she attempted to link her electoral struggles today to those she faced before winning the New Hampshire primary in January.

“I landed in New Hampshire on a Thursday night down 9 points, and I won on Tuesday,” she said. “You can turn elections in a day. You can turn them in a week if you know what it takes to actually win. I believe I know with your help, that is exactly what we’re going to do.”

But when Clinton landed in New Hampshire, there still were 48 states left to vote. Now only five states and Puerto Rico remain, and none of them can give her the pledged delegates she needs to win.

The New York senator had a breathless day of coast-to-coast campaigning planned Thursday as she tuned out calls from Democrats and pundits for her to face the music and accept Obama as the party’s nominee.

After campaigning in West Virginia ahead of the state’s upcoming primary Tuesday, Clinton’s marathon itinerary Thursday had her leaping from there to South Dakota to Oregon, all states that vote in the next four weeks.

But while she vows to continue her fight “until there’s a nominee,” a general consensus was growing among Democrats that the contest to become the party’s presidential candidate already had been decided beyond a reasonable doubt.

Obama’s campaign is already beginning to focus on a general election battle against John McCain, treating the race against Clinton with a dampened sense of urgency.

The moods of the campaigns could be reflected by their schedules. While Clinton participates in a flurry of activities, Obama is remaining in Washington to work on Sunate business.

However, Obama is still planning to put in the hours to finish off Clinton. He heads to Oregon later in the week, and is rounding up needed superdelegates.

At least four new Democratic superdelegates shifted toward Obama on Wednesday, convinced by his double-digit victory in North Carolina and better-than-expected showing in Indiana that he will be the candidate who takes on McCain in November.

Obama has 1,840 delegates to 1,688 for Clinton in The Associated Press tally. It takes 2,025 delegates to win the nomination in Denver this summer.

With those numbers in place, and just six total contests remaining, Obama’s supporters were sending signals to Clinton that the game was over.

“It’s effectively a Barack Obama nomination,” said Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. “I don’t see any possibility of altering or changing that inevitable fact … I respect her decision, but it doesn’t take away from the obvious, an increasingly obvious, fact that this nomination belongs to Barack Obama now.”

“She’s got to decide what she’s got to do, and barring something I’m not aware of, this looks like it’s headed to a Barack nomination,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd said. “I think at some point you have to start asking yourself, ‘What’s the purpose here?’”

Both Kennedy and Dodd have endorsed Obama.

Clinton faced added pressure from the media. The New York Post declared that she was was “TOAST!” on its front page Wednesday, and The Drudge Report Web site ran a photo of Obama with the caption, “The Nominee.”

Even one of Clinton’s high-powered Senate supporters was questioning her game plan.

“The question comes, ‘How do you get to 2,025 delegates?’ And I want to talk to Senator Clinton. I’d like to know what her strategy is,” said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“She’s my friend. And I’m loyal. On the other hand, I don’t want to rip the party asunder.”

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the Illinois senator netted 13 delegates from Tuesday’s contests in North Carolina and Indiana — meaning Obama erased Clinton’s 12-delegate gain from the Pennsylvania primary two weeks earlier — and Obama’s pledged delegate lead had now achieved “a high water mark.”

Seeing the end in sight, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod appeared to be shifting the campaign toward a general election fight, saying McCain has “run free for some time now” because of Democratic preoccupation with the primary fight.

“I don’t think we’re going to spend time solely in primary states,” Axelrod said. “We have multiple tasks here.”

But Clinton is still looking ahead and is sticking with her fight to count Michigan’s and Florida’s delegations, which were stripped because the states held primaries in violation of national party rules. Clinton won both states, though neither candidate campaigned in Florida and Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.

The former first lady declined to say whether she will wait until the roll call of the states at the Democratic National Convention in August before she calls it quits.

Clinton also disclosed that she had lent her campaign an additional $6.4 million in recent weeks, evidence that her once front-runner campaign was in deep trouble.

She told reporters the loans were a sign of her commitment to her quest for the White House. She earlier had lent herself $5 million as she struggled to keep up with a better-financed Obama campaign.

Clinton met with undecided superdelegates at Democratic Party headquarters Wednesday. She said, “We talked a lot about Florida and Michigan … I continue to emphasize and stress that we cannot disenfranchise those voters.”

Clinton picked up at least one superdelegate earlier in the day.

There were reports that another superdelegate, North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler, was endorsing Clinton. But he later said he was not endorsing anybody. Rather, he said he would pledge his support at the August convention to whomever won the popular vote in his district, if the nomination is still up for grabs. Clinton won his district.

Obama’s campaign dropped broad hints it was time for the 270 remaining unaligned superdelegates to get off the fence and settle the nomination. In a memorandum to superdelegates, Plouffe reminded them of the delegate math necessary to secure the nomination. He said Clinton would need to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates to win — an extremely unlikely scenario, made harder by her poor performance Tuesday.

“With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days,” Plouffe wrote.

“While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or millions of supporters, volunteers and donors.”

Obama was to make his pitch to the congressional fence sitters in meetings Thursday. He also planned to start traveling to swing states to signal that the general election has begun.