Pointing the way to a peaceful end for the tumultuous presidential primary campaign, some key supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that they accepted a new finish line in the race for delegates, a threshold Barack Obama could reach as soon as this week.

Obama aides said they expected him to surpass the 2,118 needed delegates after the final Democratic balloting finished Tuesday in South Dakota and Montana, and as more superdelegates backed the Illinois senator.

Moreover, a number of Clinton backers signaled Sunday that they were wary of the kind of protracted fight that some of her aides said they might wage in the coming months.

Some of Clinton’s closest advisors want the New York senator to challenge the party’s unusual decision Saturday to shift four of Clinton’s Michigan delegates to Obama in an attempt to reflect how voters might have cast ballots and to allocate Michigan’s uncommitted delegates to Obama, even though his name did not appear on the ballot in the state.

Even if Clinton won those delegates in a challenge, it would be unlikely to alter the outcome.
Such sentiments signaled that the Democratic Party might have vaulted a major hurdle in its quest to move beyond the competitive primary season and lay the groundwork for the fall campaign against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. That achievement came Saturday when the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee agreed to seat the disqualified Florida and Michigan delegations, but to halve their votes as punishment for holding their primaries early.

Clinton and her top aides conceded nothing Sunday, and even used their own mathematical formula to declare her the winner of the popular vote. But she may begin feeling intense pressure from within her camp to stand down, should Obama cross the delegate threshold for victory.