Clinton faces uphill battle despite win in Pennsylvania primary

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's victory in the Pennsylvania primary Tuesday keeps her on the playing field against Sen. Barack Obama in the extended World Series of Democratic politics, but the game for her now becomes harder.

Her finances bleak and Obama still leading in every statistic despite a few recent stumbles, Clinton's campaign faces a steady uphill climb as the Democratic Party winds up this historic primary season with a six-week stretch of contests from Oregon to Puerto Rico.

The next big event: May 6 primaries in Indiana, where Clinton has another fighting chance, and North Carolina, where she is a big underdog, en route to the primary season's June 3 windup in Montana and South Dakota.

"She did what she had to do, shore up her base. And the race goes on and on and on," said Terry Madonna, director of the Floyd Institute's Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

With 99 percent of precincts counted, Clinton had 55 percent of the vote to Obama's 45 percent. Despite losing the Pennsylvania popular vote, Obama retained an overall lead of at least 500,000 votes.

The Illinois senator also scored heavily in the delegate hunt to keep an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. A preliminary tabulation showed Clinton gaining at least 66 national convention delegates to 57 for Obama, with 35 still to be awarded. That gives Obama 1,705 delegates and Clinton 1,575, according to the AP tally.

Obama also has won nearly twice as many states as Clinton.

And in outspending Clinton by a 3-to-1 ratio, Obama achieved a breakthrough Tuesday in his bid to become the first African-American president: He captured the vote of nearly half (48 percent) of white men in heavily blue-collar Pennsylvania, according to exit polls.

But Clinton gained an exclamation point for her key argument to 300-plus undeclared party officials and so-called superdelegates: Obama can't win in yet another big state that is vital for the party's hopes to reclaim the White House in November. Pennsylvania was the last big northern industrial state where the Illinois senator could have altered that perception.

Yet Clinton's victory may do little to reverse another widely held perception: The New York senator's quest has become too quixotic for her party's good.

For many Democrats, the value in continuing the longest and most riveting primary contest in recent times is that it gives Obama a trial run of the attack politics he would face this fall.

Still, many Democrats worry after the campaign's recent display of vitriol that those lessons are coming at a too-steep price.

In her drive to stay on the playing field, Clinton has driven the razor-sharp action with tactics that could be a playbook for the GOP campaign this fall if Obama hangs on: branding the Illinois senator a cultural elitist and fetching up his old associates.

Clinton's critics accused her of playing the politics of fear with eleventh-hour ads in Pennsylvania featuring video of Osama bin Laden and the famous Harry Truman quote aimed at Obama: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

But her approach worked: Of those Pennsylvanians who decided in the last week, 58 percent went with Clinton, according to exit polls. And Democrats can expect to hear more of the same.

Meanwhile, Obama responded negatively himself, thereby joining the hard-edged politics he decries and leaving tarnish on both Democrats. Said Madonna: "You begin to see that he's looking more mortal every week."

A Suffolk University poll reflected the latest damage: One in every five Democrats said if their candidate didn't win, they'd cast their ballot for GOP nominee John McCain. An additional 4 percent said they would join independent Ralph Nader's quadrennial effort.

"I think there's a tremendous fatigue in Democratic Party circles," said Simon Rosenberg, who heads the New Democratic Network think-tank alliance in Washington. "People want this to be over. They're ready to get on with the general election."

There was a Republican primary Tuesday, but since McCain is the presumptive nominee, it was viewed as a formality. Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul were on the ballot with McCain. With 99 percent of the vote counted, McCain had 73 percent to Paul's 16 and Huckabee's 11.

Once again, women rose up to preserve Clinton's fighting chance: 60 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted were women, almost identical to the women's vote in Ohio, which rescued Clinton six weeks ago. By contrast, a little more than half of the voters in Missouri, where Obama won, were women.

Clinton's main target in the days ahead will be contributors rather than voters. Her campaign began the month in the red — $10.3 million owed and $9.3 million on hand, and there's surely more debt and less cash by now.

Obama, on the other hand, had more than $40 million on hand with a relatively tiny $663,000 in unpaid bills, giving him an advantage in the next big day two weeks from now.

Clinton found again in Pennsylvania that it's the economy on people's minds, and she reached into her diminished treasury to begin airing an ad in Indiana in which she asserts: "I think this election, particularly here in Indiana, is about jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs."

Rosenberg, for one, questioned whether Clinton has the capacity even with a potent message to change an outcome that has seemed set in stone for close to two months now.

"I don't know that Senator Clinton any longer has the ability to alter the fundamental dynamic in this race," he said.

The Associated Press and The New York Times contributed to this report.