SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL) (Democratic presidential candidate.): (From videotape.) They're ready to turn the page and write a new chapter in American history. And on June 3rd we are going to bring this nomination to a close.
MS. IFILL: And apparently not one minute before.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY) (Democratic presidential candidate.): (From videotape.) I'm going to keep making our case until we have a nominee, whoever she may be.
MS. IFILL: But what's really going on. Is Hillary Clinton actually competing? Can Barack Obama afford to wait to claim the nomination?
MS. IFILL: If you were looking for the true signs that the Democratic primary process is essentially over, consider the players on the field this week. All of a sudden, it seemed the real fight was between Barack Obama and John McCain.
MS. IFILL: Hillary Clinton, even after a big Kentucky win, is increasingly on the sidelines. We'll get to that in a moment. We'll start now with Barack Obama. And sticking with the war analogy, Dan, what do his generals have laid out?
MR. BALZ: Well, sticking with the war analogy, they are fighting a two front war at this point. Their first obligation is to wrap up the nomination and Senator Clinton is still continuing on in this fight. There are three primaries left, in Puerto Rico, in Montana, South Dakota. He's not yet got the delegates to secure the nomination. So their first priority is really to win this and win it as quickly as they can and lock it up. But they are doing an enormous amount of work to try to get ready for the general election. They see McCain on the air with television ads in some of the battleground states and anticipate that McCain will be doing more of that. They want to be ready for that. They are in the process of trying to staff up for the fall campaign. And this week it became known that they've actually started, quietly, a vice presidential search process --
MS. IFILL: Not so quiet actually. We found out about it.
MR. BALZ: -- under the direction of Jim Johnson, who did the same for John Kerry four years ago. So they -- as one of the Obama people said today, there are not enough hours in the day to deal with all of the things we're trying to do at this moment.
MS. IFILL: So they're behind?
MR. BALZ: They are behind. They think that they -- what they are worried about is that if this drags on past June 3rd very long, every day after that costs them time. They want to be able to make a very quick pivot from the nomination battle to a full-fledged general election race.
MS. IFILL: Let's move on and find out what Hillary Clinton is up to because she has been casting her continuing campaign in historic terms.
SEN. CLINTON: (From videotape.) It took more than 70 years of struggle, setbacks, and grinding hard work and only one of those original suffragists lived to see women cast their ballots. There are women here today, as with my own mother, who were born before the Constitution granted us the right to vote.
MS. IFILL: It's really interesting to hear Hillary Clinton this week casting her campaign in terms of voting rights in Zimbabwe, she invoked, and the Suffragettes. Is there any coincidence?
MS. TUMULTY: Well, I think she's got a couple of messages going here. First of all, she is answering the question, why do you continue to fight when it looks so hopeless? And how she feels, at least what I'm told, is that she really does feel as though she has accomplished something historic in this campaign and that she owes it to the people who feel strongly about this candidacy, who have invested their hopes in her to at least to see it through to the end.
And she's also, I think, this week in an interview with the "Washington Post" really articulated for the first time what a lot of her supporters are feeling, which is that all the obstacles that she has had to confront in this campaign, one of which has been blatant sexism. And this is something, by the way, that I hear when you travel the country talking to women -- not just her supporters, but Barack Obama's supporters and even some Republican women have come up to me and said the things that have been said about Hillary Clinton in the media, the kinds of jokes that have been made about her, the fact that airport gift shops are selling Hillary Clinton nutcrackers, these are the kinds of things that are just blatantly sexist.
MS. IFILL: But I guess the question becomes whether it costs her the campaign because one of the things that I found interesting -- today she made a comment to a North Dakota newspaper -- South Dakota newspaper, where she said that she thought she should stay in the race until the end because, after all, so many other previous races have ended in June. And then she invoked Bobby Kennedy's assassination. Was that part of her trying to make her case, too?
MS. TUMULTY: Well it was a rather bizarre comment to make because you just really don't bring up assassinations in the middle of a presidential campaign. It was not the first time, by the way, that she had drawn this comparison. In fact, in an interview in March with my managing editor, Rick Stengel, she had spoken almost the exact same words, and it was so inappropriate. I think the backlash was immediate, and she apologized to the Kennedy family, saying that she -- basically the Kennedys had been on her mind because of Senator Kennedy's illness and --
MS. IFILL: And in March, too, when she said exactly the same thing --
MS. TUMULTY: Right, exactly. She did not address the fact that she's been saying this for two and a half months.
MR. JAVERS: Is there any sense in which this sort of assassination gaffe is in any way a window into some larger Clinton strategy, which is just to stay in the race in case anything happens? Just keep hanging on and hanging on -- maybe Obama will have some kind of scandal that will erupt, some kind of situation that will occur that will cause him to not be likable to Democratic voters and then in comes Hillary Clinton? Is that on their minds at all?
MS. TUMULTY: Well, certainly the argument that the Clinton campaign has been making to these superdelegates in this race that is looking like more and more of a long shot to her is that Obama has not been tested, that things can happen on a campaign trail, and that she says that in the end she is the stronger, more tested, surer candidate for the fall. And that, by the way, is another reason that she continues to persist. And as she racks up these really lopsided victories like she did in West Virginia and Kentucky, she is narrowing the gap in the popular votes, even though she'll never catch him in the delegates, so that she can also, as we go into the end game here, have a few more poker chips on her side of the table -- a little more leverage.
MR. BALZ: But while there is all this talk about how she's determined to go on and all of this -- this has been a week where there's much talk about whether she wants to be vice president. What can you tell us? (Laughter.)
MS. TUMULTY: Well, we reported in "Time" this week in fact that her husband believes that she has earned this and that it should be offered to her by Barack Obama. And certainly her supporters and the strategists that I talked to have suggested that if it is offered, she would not turn it down. But that's not the only thing that is likely to be at issue here at the end. In the interest of bringing unity and peace to the party, she may feel that she deserves a high-profile speaking position at the convention, maybe even to have her name put into nomination on the first ballot, that Obama could give her some help with paying off her $20 million plus campaign debt.
MR. GJELTEN: Karen, would she be saying the things that she's saying in the strident way that she has been talking, for example, about Florida and Michigan this week if she really wanted something like the vice presidential position? It seems --
MS. IFILL: It seems odd to be asking for something and raising questions of assassination at the same time.
MS. TUMULTY: Well, it is also odd because, as we reported, her supporters, her close allies have been calling some of these crucial superdelegates, some of these wavering supporters and saying, hold your fire. Stand still. Give her some time to play this out because -- and she will not do anything that will damage the nominee.
