Clemency suggests

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It is now or never for Hillary

James Forsyth

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

The over / under for Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania is about eight points. If Obama loses by less than that then the direction of the race will be pretty much unchanged by a Clinton victory. If Hillary can win by more than that, then she is going to get some momentum out of a victory there which should allow her to stay in the race a little bit longer. If she can get her margin to 12 or more, then she might really have a chance to turn this back into a genuine contest.

At the moment, the polls suggest that even with the whole fuss over Obama’s remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians being bitter and clinging to their faith and guns, she’s only ahead by around six points. If she’s going to really add to that lead then she needs to win tonight’s debate by a knockout.

The debate will be the first time that Clinton and Obama have gone head to head for almost two months. Both candidates have acquired a lot of new material to work with in that time and it’ll be interesting to see how much either candidate is prepared to go after the other’s vulnerabilities.

Hillary is probably going to feel that she has to hit hard, this might be the last debate of the campaign and Pennsylvania really is her last chance to push Obama onto the back foot. It’ll be fascinating to see if she goes anywhere near Rev Wright or sticks to the whole controversy over Obama’s recent remarks. My guess is that the Wright issue is just too racially charged for Hillary to go there, but double-punching with Wright would make it more difficult for Obama to dismiss the fuss over his patronising comments as just an overblown political row.