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Hillary Clinton conceded nothing tonight at Baruch College in New York - not the delegate count, where her rival Barack Obama passed the threshold of 2,118 delegates required to win the nomination, and certainly not the Democratic primary.

Instead, Clinton thanked the voters of South Dakota for delivering a final win in her 2008 campaign, and told supporters she’d continue fighting for her beliefs and for theirs — from instituting universal health care to ending the war in Iraq.

To that end, she said she’s going ahead with her campaign — but with an eye toward party unity. “In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way,” she said.

With Obama clinching the requisite number of delegates tonight, moving forward for Clinton would mean convincing delegates currently pledged to him to switch sides at the convention — which some Democrats say would be a blow to the Party. But Clinton said she has Democrats’ interests at heart. “I am committed to uniting our Party, so we move forward, stronger and more ready than ever to take back the White House this November,” she said.

“Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly,” Clinton told the crowd. “This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight.”

She asked supporters to help her decide by submitting suggestions on her website — where, conveniently, they can donate to the campaign. Those in the room seemed to be in agreement on where to go next — chanting “Denver! Denver!” to urge the New York Senator to take her fight to the convention in August.

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The end-of-the-campaign symbolism quotient was high in Yankton, SD today, where Hillary and Chelsea Clinton campaigned in a high school cafeteria in a last ditch effort to gin up one more win before the primary process is over.

First, Clinton thanked the wrong mayor.

“I also want to acknowledge your mayor, Curt Bernard,” she said. Instant muttering, head-shaking, and scattered boos from the citizenry. Clinton leaned down as someone told her her screw-up. “Dan Specht! I’ve got the wrong list,” she said. “Mr Mayor, it’s great to be with you. I don’t know who the other gentleman is, but I hope I haven’t offended him.”

Turns out, the other gentleman WAS the mayor of Yankton — 6 months ago, when the unpopular official was kicked out of office by the city commission.

Adding injury to insult, Clinton’s voice gave out not once, but twice - a circumstance she blamed on her marathon 7-hour caravan extravaganza in Puerto RIco on Saturday.

Chelsea ably filled in for her ailing mom, discussing the NY Senator’s health care plan during the first round of her bout with her vocal chords, and going into energy and infrastructure policy when the elder Clinton was force to go backstage and gargle to defeat the problem.

The whole situation wasn’t helped by what Clinton called an “echo-ey” sound system that had both the senator and her daughter talking as though they were on quaaludes.

Clinton did get a new electoral message out before her voice gave out — outlining a post-primary campaign strategy.” Tomorrow is the last day of the primaries, and the beginning of a new phase in the campaign,” she said. “The voters will have voted, and so the decision will fall to the delegates empowered to vote at the Democratic convention. And I will be spending the coming days making my case to those delegates.”

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Hillary Clinton rolled into Tally’s Restaurant in downtown Rapid City more than an hour late, but could be forgiven; she’d gotten in the night before around 4am Eastern time. Shaking hands, she got a lot of encouragement from voters who wanted her to stay in the race. One older man called her a fighter; she told him to come out and supporter her at the polls tomorrow.

Speaking to the crowd of about 200 inside and outside the diner, she said she was grateful that she kept the campaign going until South Dakota would have the last word. And she made it clear she’s fighting this thing to the bitter end.

“We had a great victory in Puerto Rico yesterday, another lopsided win. I am now over 300,000 votes ahead in the popular vote, and I am slightly behind in delegates,” she said. “But we’re going to make our case to all of the delegates.”

There are very few polls in South Dakota and Montana, but the general consensus is that Clinton faces an uphill battle to win in the two Western states. Clinton acknowledged as much today. “We started out way behind in South Dakota. My opponent has a tremendous base of support here. But we’ve put together an amazing grassroots volunteer driven campaign, across the state,” she said.

“What South Dakota decides tomorrow will have a big influence on what people think going forward. Because our main job at the end of this historic, closely contested primary season is to nominate the next president, who must be a Democrat. That is our goal.”

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She’s not getting directly involved in the back and forth between Barack Obama and John McCain over whether Obama has been to Iraq enough times - or whether Obama should accompany McCain on a trip there, as the GOP nominee has suggested. But Hillary Clinton reminded crowds in South Dakota today that she’s been to Iraq with McCain — something she used to say often on the trail, but started bringing up again recently only after McCain began questioning Obama’s credibility on Iraq.

“John McCain is a friend of mine. I admire and respect and honor his service to our country. He and I went to Iraq and Afghanistan together,” she said in Watertown. “But he has the wrong ideas for America.”

She also made sure to mention that she’s traveled to Iraq enough to get to know the principles in the war torn country; Obama has been only once. “I’ve been there three times. I’ve met with the leaders of all the factions,” she told the crowd. “They basically have just been willing to stand by and wait, because they thought we would be there for as long as it took.”

Clinton has avoided any direct criticism of Obama since her chance at the nomination all but ended with a big loss in North Carolina. But subtle jabs like this one keep coming — as do claims that she’s more electable against John McCain.

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Hillary Clinton visited the back of her press plane for the first time in weeks after a campaign stop in Rapid City, SD, waxing reflective about the 16-month primary campaign that’s now nearing an end.

“I feel so good about the process, you know? I feel like this has been a really positive, productive primary season in so many ways,” she said. “Maybe we can make it more sensible, but given the rules that we had I feel really good about going through the weekend.”

“We’ll see what the Rules and Bylaws Committee does with Michigan and Florida we’ll see what happens in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota and then we’ll see where we are,” she continued. The Rules Committee meets in Washington on Saturday to determine how to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan. The Clinton campaign has said it wants all the delegates and superdelegates seated based on the January election results, but has signaled a willingness to compromise.

Clinton also said she feels a sense of accomplishment as the primaries wind down. “I have really enjoyed the process of being able to go out and see this country anew ,” she said. “I did it in an abrivitated way in ’92 but I’ve done it in a much more thorough and comprehensive way, as you have known because you have been with me so much of the time.”

“This is a great, resilient, resourceful country that has been badly led, but the capacitites are all there. We just have to unleash them again.”

Sticking it out to the very end is a clear source of pride for the New York Senator - who has faced daunting delegate math for months. “I feel good because so many people react to my having stayed in. People have been trying to get me out since January, basically, and you know I just wasn’t going anywhere,” she said. “I feel good about that because that’s a reflection of a lot of peoples experience in life.”

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RAPID CITY, SD — Hillary Clinton waited until well after the evening newscasts and newspaper deadlines to respond to the news of the day — Scott McClellan’s tell-all book excoriating his former bosses in the Bush White House.

“Today the news is filled with stories about a book that was published by the former press secretary to President Bush. And in this book, this young man essentially apologizes for having been part of misleading America for three years,” she said. “He talks about how difficult it was that our president and those working with him didn’t either level with the American people or didn’t change course when circumstances demanded it.”

“There isn’t any doubt that President Bush has misled us. The question now is what kind of president we need going forward.”

From the McClellan book, Clinton quickly made a turn to bashing John McCain. “Senator McCain, who’s a friend of mine, we serve together on the Senate Armed Services Committee and I honor his service to our nation, promises more of the same,” she said. “More of the same on the economy, and more of the same in Iraq.”

“We need a president with a proven track record and the strength and experience to level with the American people and undo the damage that has been done to our military, to those who serve, to our standing in the world. If you give me a chance that is exactly what I intend to do.”

UPDATE: Clinton came to the back of the press plane Wednesday night, going into more detail about the McClellan allegations.

“I don’t know him so I don’t have any personal assessment of him,” she said. “It seems odd to me to write a book about 3 years of a job you did basically trying to disclaim any responsibility for what you did, and I don’t think that it comes as a surprise that George Bush and his team mislead America. It’s tragic to hear the details about it, but I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy.

“”What I hope is that the press and the public and the political class will be much more vigorous and skeptical than everybody was and everyone, in his or her way you know basically let the administration get away with it and they got away with it, they got reelected and here we are. And now all the books have come out, and unfortunately there are a lot of people in a position that know a lot more than most of us who went along and acquiesced and I find that very sad.”

The drive from civilization to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a long and desolate one — no to mention cell-service free — but it’s a necessary one for politicians hoping to win the state. The last two Senate races have been decided here; Tim Johnson earned the margin he needed with high turnout, while then-Senate leader Tom Daschle failed to turn out the vote in Indian Country, losing the state to John Thune.

So there was ample political reason for Hillary Clinton to make the drive here, even if her event outside the Little Wound School in Kyle, SD drew only about 100 people. As befitting her surroundings — Kyle is located in the most impoverished county in the nation — Clinton delivered a solemn address highlighting the failure of previous politicians to deliver on their promises of economic help.

“I’m not here to make a big speech. I’m not here to tell you things that I have no intention of trying to make happen. You’ve seen too many speeches, you’ve heard too many words that never translated into reality,” she said. “I don’t need to tell you that despite promises going back many, many years, we, the United States government and the people of the United States, haven’t done nearly what we should have to address the challenges here in Indian country.”

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Senator Clinton’s original South Dakota itinerary did not include a visit to the state’s most famous tourist destination – even though it was just a few miles away from her Rapid City hotel. But when told that members of the press corps were organizing an early morning trip to check out the monument – unsure that they’d ever be back in the Mt Rushmore state – Clinton decided to join the caravan.

For a traveling press corps that’s followed her every movement for months, the New York Senator’s itch to play tourist ended a rare and precious chance to escape the so-called campaign bubble; with the candidate on board, a leisurely sightseeing trip becomes work, as doing our job requires watching what she does and what she says in case she makes even the slightest bit of news.

But even though it was her unplanned presence at the monument that forced the press to be on the job, the New York Senator admonished the media for paying more attention to her than to the four presidents carved in stone behind her. She didn’t seem to want us there any more than we wanted her there.

“This is not an event. This is a tourist occasion,” she said to reporters and photographers training their lenses on her instead of the mountain. “Come on, we’ve got the head park service person up here, just come up and listen.”

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BRANDON, SD - Another example of the power of the Drudge Report today, as a NY Post story pointing out that Clinton brought up the assassination of Robert F Kennedy in 1968 during an editorial board meeting sent reporters traveling with Clinton into a frenzy.

Asked by South Dakota newspaper the Argus Leader why she didn’t buy the argument that the party was fracturing because of the prolonged contest, Clinton said “my husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June.”

“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she continued. “You know i just dont understand it.”

Almost instantly, the Post story was circulated to the press corps via blackberry and Drudge, and reporters here at Clinton’s town hall meeting abandoned any pretense of listening to the event — flocking around the first Clinton flack they could find for a response to the quote.

After a brief off the record defense of Clinton’s comments, Campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee gave reporters what they were looking for. “She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer,” he said. “Any reading into it beyond that would be inaccurate.”

The ‘reading into it’ they might be worried about is speculation that Clinton would deliberately bring up talk of assassination to raise fears that, as an African American candidate, Obama might face the same danger as Kennedy. Before his big win in Iowa, many African Americans in the South cited the danger of assassination as a reason not to support Obama.

But Clinton has made a similar “long primaries are fine” argument before — once with a more oblique reference to the Kennedy assassination. “If you look at successful presidential campaigns, my husband didn’t get the nomination until June of 1992. I remember, tragically, Senator Kennedy won California near the end of that process,” she said at a DC fundraiser on May 7th. “It has often gone on. And we have a lot to work out here. Because we have to figure out who would be the stronger candidate.”

UPDATE: After the uproar, Clinton came to the TV cameras to make a brief statement on her remarks.

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Another denial of the CNN report suggesting that Clinton and Obama insiders are hashing out a deal for her to exit the race – this one from the candidate herself.

“That’s flatly untrue… flatly, completely untrue,” she said in an interview with the Argus Leader in South Dakota. It is not anything I’m entertaining, it is nothing I have planned.”

She said she intends to continue “vigorously campaigning” between now and South Dakota’s primary on June 3rd, saying she doesn’t understand that calls to exit. “between my opponent and his campaign and some in the media, there has been this urgency to end this,” she ssaid. “People have been trying to push me out of this since Iowa.”

Earlier today, top Obama and Clinton aides also denied the report, which claimed that insiders from both campaigns were discussing options to give Senator Clinton a graceful exit strategy – including offering her the Vice Presidential slot on the Obama ticket.