WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON -- Low on funds and slipping further behind Barack Obama in the presidential contest, Hillary Clinton tried to inject new enthusiasm into her campaign yesterday just hours after escaping defeat in the Indiana primary.
Clinton held a hastily arranged town hall meeting in West Virginia, where she vowed to go on. An absence of public events on her schedule had prompted news media speculation that she might be preparing to quit the race.
Obama, meanwhile, took a day off with his family in Chicago, while leading supporters publicly called on undeclared superdelegates to endorse him and bring the nomination fight to a close.
Democratic strategists not connected to either candidate said the campaign was likely to continue through the final primaries June 3. But they also said the nomination race was effectively over, after Obama's double-digit victory in North Carolina and Clinton's near-defeat in Indiana, where she won by 1 percentage point.
Former Sen. George McGovern, the party's 1972 nominee, announced that he was switching his allegiance from Clinton to Obama and called on her to leave the race.
But Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an Obama supporter who spoke to reporters in a conference call arranged by the campaign, said it would be "inappropriate and awkward and wrong for any of us to tell Senator Clinton when it is time for the race to be over."
Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who is not working in the presidential campaign, said Clinton's continuing presence in the race "isn't by itself hurtful" to Obama, "as long as she doesn't attack him overtly and turn this into a negative campaign against him."
He said that Obama might actually be helped by her decision to keep going, because it would be "a lot worse" for Obama if Clinton stopped campaigning and she won anyway in West Virginia on Tuesday, where she leads by nearly 30 percentage points in some polling.
Clinton told reporters in Shepherdstown, W.Va., that she was "staying in this race until there's a nominee, and I am obviously going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee."
Outraised and outspent by Obama, her campaign is reported to be deeply in debt. Aides said Clinton had lent herself an added $6.4 million to keep the campaign afloat over the past month, bringing the total amount she has given her campaign to more than $11 million.
Obama's campaign used the news of Clinton's loan to make a fresh fundraising pitch.
