Clinton warned: win decisively or it's over

This is the ad that Hillary is running in the final stages of the Pennsylvania election. With it's images of Pearl Harbour, the great depression, bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina it's unsurprising that she has been accused of playing the politics of fear.

The advert concluded with the line: "You need to be ready for anything".

Mrs Clinton's chief strategist Geoff Garin said it was a positive advert.

"It states why Hillary Clinton is the right choice to be president," he said. "We're at a moment where we need a president who's got the strength and knowledge to take on very tough challenges."

But Bill Burton, from Mr Obama's team, said: "We already have a president who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another."

Barack Obama has all but conceded that he will not win in Pennsylvania:

Obama, who has established an almost unassailable lead in the contest, told Pittsburgh radio station KDKA he did not anticipate emerging victorious from Pennsylvania. But he said: "I'm predicting it's going to be close and that we are going to do a lot better than people expect."

Obama's people have been very accurate about predicting the results so far and I can only assume that they know what they are saying when they make this kind of prediction. Hillary is not going to win by double digits here, in a contest which she began with a twenty point lead.

Anything less than a ten point victory is going to increase the Democratic pressure on Hillary to step down.

Then there's the financial side of things:

Even if Clinton were to secure the outsize victory she needs in Pennsylvania, figures for funding released yesterday raised questions about her ability to fight on. Obama raised more than twice as much as Clinton last month, entering April with $42m (£21m) in the bank. Although she raised $20m in March, she is still staggering on with $10.3m of debt.

The pressure appears to be getting to Hillary, as she is now firing off accusations which make simply no sense:

Over the weekend, Mrs Clinton hit out at Mr Obama after he said Mr McCain would make a better president than George W Bush.

"We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain, and I will be that nominee," she said.

Coming from the woman who said John McCain and herself had passed the threshold for the office of Commander in Chief and implying that Obama had not, this latest statement from Hillary is yet another where one is simply asked to suspend all disbelief and accept that reality begins from this moment onwards.

It is simply insane for Hillary to accuse Obama of cheering on John McCain, when this is the very crime which Hillary committed which angered most of us in the first place. She consistently heaped praise on McCain and would often state that, whilst she and McCain had "the experience of a lifetime", all Obama had was "a speech he gave in 2002."

And yet now she expects us to share her outrage when Obama says that both he and Hillary would be better than McCain but that even McCain won't be as bad as Bush.

This latest spat is a perfect example of all that has been wrong with Hillary's campaign. Even the outrage has seemed manufactured and calculated. And now we find her pretending to find Obama's comments to be "cheering on John McCain" and ignores the fact that she has actually stated that John McCain is more fit to be president than Barack Obama.

At times like this I honestly wonder about her sanity.

Soon enough we will know the outcome of Pennsylvania. Should Hillary fail to win by double digits that sound you hear will be the noise of the super delegates breaking away.

And then it really will, finally, be game over.

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Tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, US election 2008, Democratic presidential nominee, Pennsylvania, super delegates