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.

The problem the Democrats were having with what to do with the Florida and Michigan delegates was finally decided today. The two states’ delegations will be seated at the convention with each delegate receiving a half vote. In Michigan, Hillary Clinton got 69 delegates and Barack Obama, who wasn’t on the state’s ballot, 59. Florida’s delegate distribution was based on the actual primary results, with Clinton getting 105 pledged delegates and Obama picking up 67.

The compromise decision made by the Rules Committee was not well received by the Clinton contingent in attendance, in fact, according to AP’s account, the scene at times got a bit ugly with shouting matches going back and forth, interrupting the proceedings:

“We just blew the election!” a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters.

“This isn’t unity! Count all the votes!” another audience member yelled.

Clinton supporter and member of the Rules Committee Harold Ickes angrily informed his colleagues that Clinton reserves the right appeal the matter to the Credentials Committee, which could drag the matter out all the way to the Democratic convention in August.

Despite the fact that Obama says he wants his campaign to transcend race, exit polls and election anecdotes seem to reveal another shameful truth: Some people aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, and others are going to put up vocal, overt and racist opposition.

Andrew Sullivan says, “I think all of us who once dismissed the fashionable view around the world that a black man would have a real problem becoming an American president have had a learning experience these past few weeks. … You have to be blind not to see the impact of race.”

In Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign dealt with vandalism and volunteers faced racial slurs. The North Carolina GOP party ran an ad John McCain denounced and the New York Times condemned as “a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state.” Pennsylvania exit polls showed the usual racial rift: Clinton won white voters – the older the voter group, the greater the margin – while Obama won 85 percent of the black vote.

An April AP-Yahoo poll found that 8 percent of white voters would be uncomfortable voting for a black candidate, but given people’s reluctance to admit racism the number is probably higher. A prominent Republican told Politico’s Roger Simon that if Obama faces John McCain, the racist vote is worth 15 percent to McCain.

If McCain is getting the racist vote in November, is Hillary Clinton getting it now? Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told Talking Points Memo that race-based voters are “probably firmly in John McCain’s camp anyway.” But in Pennsylvania, about one in five said the candidate’s race was among the top deciding factors, and white voters who cited race supported Clinton over Obama three to one.

The racial tension is spilling over into party politics. The Washington Post leads today with a story about Democrats fearing a racial divide within the party. After Bill Clinton accused the Obama camp of playing the race card on him, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn called Clinton’s behavior “bizarre” and accused the Clinton campaign of marginalizing black voters and creating racial divides within the Democratic party.

On The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson says, “Much of the tragedy of the Obama campaign is how ever so steadily, incrementally its theme has devolved into a racialist message.” The question is whether or not this racialism was always present in Obama’s campaign, as Hanson suggests, or due to a still racially charged political climate.

North Carolina Dems will have to go to the polls on May 6 without a debate in their state between the party’s top two front-runners. The state Democratic Party announced today that the face-off between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton scheduled for this coming Sunday evening on CBS has been called off, mainly because Obama would not commit to doing it. It also means that CBS anchor Katie Couric will likely go the entire primary season without moderating a debate.

Listen to a podcast of Robert Novak’s column from today, where he writes: “The Ferraro fiasco provides more evidence that Obama, as the first African-American with a real chance to become president, has exposed an ugly racial divide in what was supposed to be a colorblind Democratic Party.”

Usually associated with social conservatives and the Republican Party, the pro-life movement is gaining new ground among Democrats who want to make America a two-pro-life party system.

“We really need pro-life Democrats,” Kristen Day, president of Democrats for Life of America, told WoW. “Without having a pro-life majority, we’re not going to get anything done.”

According to Day, who wrote the book Democrats for Life: Pro-life Politics and the Silenced Majority, the Democratic Party has not always been staunchly pro-abortion. Twenty-five years ago, Democrats held a majority in the House with 125 of their 292 seats belonging to pro-life Democrats. The party’s pro-abortion position developed gradually as abortion-rights activists used what they had learned in the anti-war campaign to change the party platform.

Day said for the first time in 2007, the Democratic Party lent its full support to pro-life candidates, and the number of pro-life Democrats in the House and Senate increased for the first time in 25 years. There are seven pro-life Democrats in the House. Pro-life Democratic Senators include Bob Casey, Jr. and Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader. In 2008, pro-life Democrats in Colorado and Minnesota will present pro-life language at local caucuses with the hopes of changing the party platform –a goal Day admits will be difficult to accomplish.

“There is still a sense out there that you can’t trust pro-life democrats,” Day told WoW. “If you go to a local caucus meeting and you say that you’re pro-life, people have been told not to come back. People don’t think they’re really Democrats.”

For Day, a pro-life stance is part and parcel of the Democrats’ human rights’ legacy. “The Democratic Party is very good on most of the life issues, human rights, death penalty, wages adequate for families to have enough food to eat,” Day said. “This is the next big fight that we can win, the battle for the unborn and providing civil rights for the unborn.”

It seems like you can’t turn on the TV or the radio or read a newspaper or a political blog these days without hearing someone talk about “super delegates” and how they could affect the Democratic presidential nomination process. WORLD’s own Jamie Dean was way ahead of the curve in this discussion, writing a cover story about “The Other Campaign” for the current issue of the magazine. (If you’re not a WORLD subscriber and missed it, it’s available for free over on the magazine site for a few more days, so be sure to check it out.)

In addition to providing a timeline on the history of this Democratic Party peculiarity, Jamie profiled Waring Howe Jr., a super delegate from Charleston, S.C. “From his office on Broad Street, Howe readily tells visitors to Charleston what they should eat (She-Crab soup), what they should see (the historic waterfront), and what they should buy (sweetgrass baskets handmade by locals),” Jamie writes. “The chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party also tells fellow Democrats which candidate he thinks they should vote for: Sen. Barack Obama.”

As we head toward Super Tuesday, the Democrats have narrowed their field of candidates down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, with John Edwards “suspending” his campaign today “so that history can blaze its path.” (Technically, there are still three Democratic candidates, if you count Mike Gravel.) According to a recent Associated Press–Yahoo poll, four in 10 Edwards supporters would pick Clinton as their second choice, while a quarter would go with Obama.