By AFP,
Scranton, Pennsylvania : Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of stooping to “desperate” tactics, as polls put her on track for a morale-boosting win in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania presidential primary.
The Democratic rivals launched a frenzied day of last-gasp campaigning across the economically challenged state, as Clinton hoped for a big win to reinvigorate her uphill comeback bid, while Obama aimed for a knockout.
The New York senator said in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer that despite trailing Obama in nominating wins and elected delegates, she was still the most likely Democrat to beat Republican John McCain in November.
“He can be elected; I will be elected,” Clinton said, and accused Obama of going negative in the final hours of the battle for Pennsylvania, which heralds the end-game of the contentious White House battle.
“I think he’s doing what candidates do when they get desperate at the end of an election,” Clinton said. “He has spent all this time crossing Pennsylvania talking about how he runs a positive campaign, except when he gets pressed, and he starts throwing … the ‘kitchen sink’ at me.”
Last minute polls appeared to show that Clinton, who once led in Pennsylvania by 20 points, but has seen the race narrow, was again set for victory in a state packed with her working class supporters.
The New York senator led Obama 52 percent to 42 percent in a Suffolk University survey.
A Quinnipiac University poll had her up seven points 51-44 percent, one point up from last week in the same survey.
Obama however in an interview with a Pittsburgh radio station, said he would do well.
“I am not predicting a win. I am predicting it is going to be close and we are going to do a lot better than people expect,” he told KDKA.
The Illinois senator is banking on a landslide in the Philadelphia area, with his high numbers of African-American, young and more affluent voters, to offset Clinton’s hold on poorer, more conservative western regions.
Clinton hopes to win big to sow doubts about Obama’s viability in a general election against McCain.
She argues that only she can capture big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, by wooing socially conservative blue-collar voters that Democrats need to piece together a route back to the White House.
The rivals both headed north from Philadelphia to Scranton, a tough town built on steel and railroads, where Clinton’s grandfather once worked in a lace mill, before chasing one another across the state’s major media markets.
Clinton was due to host several rallies with her husband, former president Bill Clinton to wrap up her effort.
On Sunday, the senator accused Obama of cheerleading for McCain, after he said the Arizona senator would be a better president than George W. Bush, apparently contradicting Democratic strategy.
Obama’s camp meanwhile looked past Tuesday’s primary to warn time was running out for the former first lady.
Obama said Clinton was now using on him, the kind of withering attacks that she suffered as first lady in the White House between 1993 and 2001.
“I’m thinking well, you learned the wrong lessons from those Republicans who were going after you in the same ways using the same tactics all those years,” Obama was quoted as saying by CBS News.
After a 15-month race, neither Democrat is expected to reach the tally of 2,025 nominating delegates to claim the nomination outright.
So Clinton needs to convince nearly 800 superdelegates — top party officials who can vote how they like at August’s party convention — that it would be too risky to pick the inexperienced Obama to fight McCain in November.
McCain meanwhile heralded a possible general election attack on Obama, rebuking the Democrat’s links to a 1960s radical whom McCain called an “unrepentant terrorist.”
The Arizona senator said he was sure Obama was “very patriotic” but said his relationship with William Ayers, a University of Illinois professor who was once part of the violent Weather Underground group, was “open to question.”