The presidential primary season is finally winding down, with the last two contests in South Dakota and Montana tomorrow. Although Hillary Clinton picked up another lopsided primary win over the weekend, this time in Puerto Rico, her chances to win the Democratic nomination are hanging by a thread, especially after Saturday’s Rules Committee decision. Still, the Democratic Party’s version of the Energizer Bunny keeps trudging on. Her latest strategy is to try to convince superdelegates committed to Barack Obama to change their minds and back her. And, of course, she can challenge Saturday’s compromise decision that left her with fewer delegates than she had hoped.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have pledged to fellow Democrats, in hardly uncertain terms, to do their best to end the party’s marathon nominating war, like, yesterday—at least, certainly before it reaches the national convention in August.

On a San Francisco talk radio show Thursday, Reid said he’d spoken with Pelosi and party chairman Howard Dean and all three agreed they should take steps to avoid a contest drawn all the way out to August. “We all are going to urge our folks next week to make a decision very quickly,” he said. According to The New York Times, Reid later bested that vow, telling another group in L.A. that the nominee “would be known by Wednesday”—the day after the bookending primaries in South Dakota and Montana.

He and Pelosi both have stayed neutral so far, but Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat, promised Wednesday to The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that she’d “step in” absent a resolution in June. Slightly more circumspect than Reid about more immediate action, Pelosi added vaguely that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “cannot take this fight to the convention. It must be over before then.”

A speedy resolution, of course, is what Pelosi and her party preferred from the beginning. And Obama, apparently, is betting on its imminence; he told reporters Wednesday that, as far as he’s concerned, the general election begins Wednesday. But the possibility that Clinton could drag the race out—likely for better rather than worse—to its bitter, internecine end still has conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, with his Operation Chaos, rooting for her. It’s effectively impossible, however, for Clinton to reach 2,026, that magic number of delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination before the convention. (Using the Times’s handy calculator, even if Clinton repeated her all-time best performance—her 77 percent floor wiping in Arkansas—she’d still need 83 percent of the remaining superdelegates.)

Nevertheless, Clinton has dug her heels in, ensconced for the long haul. The Times also reported yesterday on her campaign’s threefold endgame strategy: (1) though she can’t eclipse it, cut into Obama’s delegate lead by lobbying to seat as many delegates as possible from Florida and Michigan, whose standing at the convention was stripped away after their states’ parties moved the primaries up in violation of DNC rules; (2) add to her lead in the popular vote with a strong finish in Puerto Rico’s primary on June 1; and (3) persuade superdelegates to join her side, as she aimed to do yesterday with this letter and memo, by stressing both (1) and (2) as well as the Electoral College argument, a calculus based on the logic that, come November, Clinton would outperform Obama by winning more states (both blue and red) in the general election. This is particularly persuasive, she hopes, for Democrats who’ll never forget how their candidate won the popular vote in 2000 but lost under the state-by-state Electoral College system.

The result of (1) doesn’t look good, given even the best-case scenario for her (seating half the penalized delegates) theorized yesterday by party lawyers. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets Saturday to determine how many of the two rogue states’ delegates to seat. Clinton’s supporters have promised to “flood it” in protest.

Former Hillary Clinton supporter Joe Andrew, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee appointed by Bill Clinton in 1999, has switched his allegiance to Barack Obama. With less than a week to go before the Indiana primary, the Indianapolis native urged other superdelegates to follow his lead and unify behind Obama: “[A] vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists [Republican] John McCain.” Andrew had been in the Clinton camp since she first announced her candidacy.

In losing Andrew, along with other recent gains by Obama, Clinton’s superdelegate lead has shrunk to just 15, 263-248. In overall delegates, Obama now leads 1,736.5 to 1,597.5 for Clinton, with 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

After his expensive, long-term prostitution habit was discovered earlier this week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer found that he had no choice but to resign this morning. He will remain in office until Monday, when Lt. Gov. David Paterson will assume leadership of the state and become New York’s first black governor. Paterson is also legally blind.

In his resignation statement, Spitzer paraphrased Luke 12:48: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given much: the love of my family, the faith and trust of the people of New York, and the chance to lead this state. I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me. To every New Yorker, and to all those who believed in what I tried to stand for, I sincerely apologize.”

Here’s an interesting scenario: If Hillary Clinton becomes president, Paterson, a Democratic superdelegate pledged to Clinton, will be charged with naming her replacement to the U.S. Senate. Before this scandal hit, Paterson was considered a likely replacement for Clinton, so he just might appoint himself. Should that happen, Spitzer political rival Joe Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the New York State Senate who Spitzer had state troopers spy on last year, would be next in line to run the state. Meanwhile, Bruno will take on the responsibilities of lieutenant governor.

Also, this scandal means that Clinton, who only picked up a handful of delegates yesterday in Mississippi, likely will have one less superdelegate (Spitzer) voting for her at the Democratic convention in Denver.