Senator Barack Obama had a few words of advice on Saturday for his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: Do not drop out on my account.

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Obama said at a news conference in a high school gymnasium here. “Her name is on the ballot. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president.”

A few prominent Obama supporters have recently suggested that the time has come for Clinton to consider withdrawing from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, for one, said last week that Clinton could not win the race and that her attacks on Obama were hurting “more than anything that John McCain has said.”

Clinton’s forces have mounted a vigorous counterattack, saying she trails by a fairly narrow margin in the overall popular vote and in the delegate count. She has suggested to two allies that party leaders are trying to bully her.

The back and forth on Clinton’s future is accompanied by a tactical subtext. Both she and Obama have applied pressure on each other, political and financial, and then taken the role of victim to rally their partisans and donors.

Former President Bill Clinton dismissed the notion that the discord had hurt the party’s chances of capturing the White House. “We just need to relax and let this happen,” Bill Clinton said in Girardville. “Nobody’s talking about wrecking the party. Everywhere I go, all these working people say: ‘Don’t you dare let her drop out. Don’t listen to those people in Washington, they don’t represent us.’”