“Obama has work to do,” the outspoken Clinton adviser Lanny Davis told reporters in the hallway outside the gymnasium here. “Senator Clinton can’t do it for him.”

Obama’s aides had done their best throughout the day to build excitement for his clinching of the nomination. “Obama needs 41 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination,” Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer announced in an e-mail he sent out at 6:56 a.m.

It was the beginning of a day-long water torture for Clinton, as Obama aimed, by day’s end, to reach the 2,118 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

For Obama, however, it wasn’t a pretty way to clinch. He had won only six of the last 14 contests, and Tuesday night he lost South Dakota, too, where he had been heavily favored. Now that the party had partially accepted results from the Florida and Michigan primaries, Clinton could claim that she had received more votes than Obama.

And so the limping nominee needed to be carried across the finish line by the superdelegates whose support Pfeiffer announced throughout the day: a Michigan congresswoman, a Massachusetts superdelegate, one from Mississippi, two from Michigan, one from Washington D.C., two from California, one from Florida, three from Delaware. “Twelve delegates from the nomination,” Pfeiffer announced. Then 11, then 10.

On Tuesday evening, the crowd began to assemble at Baruch College in Manhattan for Clinton’s non-concession speech. Only obliquely did Clinton refer to the fact that she had, in fact, lost the nomination. “The question is: Where do we go from here?” she said. She would figure that out “in the coming days,” she said, but “I will be making no decisions tonight.” The crowd in the Bearcat Den erupted in a sustained cheer. She referred her supporters to her Web site, as she had after many a primary night victory.

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