Opinion: What does Hillary Clinton do after Tuesday?

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The crucial unanswered question at this stage of the Democratic primary fight is what Hillary Clinton plans to do next week, once contests in South Dakota and Montana wrap up the primary season.

The Clinton campaign is offering no clues.

In a conference call with reporters Friday, her aides were repeatedly asked how far they would carry their fight to seat all delegates from the disputed primaries in Michigan and Florida. Those delegates are crucial to Clinton’s increasingly improbable plan for victory. If Clinton doesn’t get everything she wants Saturday when a party committee adjudicates the issue, will she take her protest to the nominating convention in August?

‘We think it is not useful to cross streams before we come to them,’’ replied Harold Ickes, a campaign strategist.

The nightmare scenario for most party leaders is that Clinton keeps fighting through the summer. Party officials hope to rally behind a presumptive nominee by the end of June, at the latest.

In public, Clinton is taking a tough negotiating stance. A campaign attorney sent a letter to the Rules & Bylaws Committee today, arguing that it would be wrong to strip delegates from Michigan and Florida as punishment for moving up their primaries.

The two states suffered enough by virtue of the fact that neither Clinton nor Obama campaigned in either place, letter says.

But, alternatively, one person with ties to the Clinton campaign told The Times in a recent interview that among the staff, ‘There is no expectation at all that we would get 100%. That’s totally off the table at this point.’’

So the question remains: what does Clinton do?

— Peter Nicholas