With the Clinton campaign in Scranton, Pa.

UPDATE:

Shortly after this post went up, Barack Obama told listeners to KDKA radio in Pittsburgh that he is not  “predicting a victory” in Pennsylvania. There is no correlation to this post and that Obama pronouncement.

Also, the Clinton campaign, through chief strategist Geoff Garin and communications director Howard Wolfson, “categorically deny” a Drudge post that internal campaign polls show Clinton leading by 11. However, Wolfson also says Clinton expects to “narrow the popular vote considerably” after the Pennsylvnia primary — this a reference to Obama’s lead in the popular vote through all nominating contests. It does not appear possible for Clinton to achieve Wolfson’s narrow considerably standard without a double-digit victory.

Most importantly, the post below says the last competitive presidental primary in Pennsylvania occurred in 1976. THIS IS WRONG. Democrat and Bourbon Room devotee Mary Anne Marsh reminds me that the 1980 nomination battle between Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and then-President Jimmy Carter went down to the wire in Pennsylvania, with Kennedy winning a narrow victory that was not sealed until two days later following a recount of votes in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. The Philly suburbs were important then and they’re important now. THAT much The Bourbon Room got right.

Can a candidate win a presidential primary after never polling above 45 percent?

In theory, it’s possible. But it’s not very damn likely.

This is Barack Obama’s problem in Pennsylvania. And the Obama camp knows it. It will not predict victory because it knows that’s not possible. Obama’s goal is to minimize the magnitude of Clinton’s victory and fight tenaciously to win the perceptions/expectations war. Adjectives used to describe a 6-point Clinton victory (narrow, unimpressive, underwhelming) and a 12-point victory for Clinton (decisive, impressive, sizable) will in large measure dictate the way Super Delegates and contributors view Tuesday’s result.

The polling data suggests the race is close. But the polls, it seems, have a flaw almost identical to the polls in Ohio. Those polls pretty accurately predicted Obama’s support but under-counted Clinton’s.

The average of the ten polls in Ohio before Super Tuesday Part Two showed Clinton at 50.3 and Obama’s at 43.4. Clinton won the primary 54 to 44.

Here in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s average in the 10 most recent polls is 48.8 and Obama’s is 42.5. If Clinton out-performs the polls here as she did in Ohio and Obama hits his poll mark, Tuesday’s results will be 53 percent to 43 percent.

Is a 10-point victory enough for Clinton? It’s not enough to close the pledged delegate gap by very much. The Obama worst-case scenario is for Clinton to pick up 20 pledged delegates in a blowout well above 10 points for Clinton. But team Obama is betting on a Clinton pickup of 10 or fewer pledged delegates, in part because they expect to roll up big margins of victory in Philadelphia’s urban congressional districts.

So much of Tuesday’s results will be dictated by the ground war in the City of Brotherly Love and the surrounding suburbs. Seven of Pennsylvania’s 19 congressional districts are in Philadelphia or within 60 miles. Obama’s team hopes to win the African-American vote in Philadelphia by a margin of 90 percent to 10 percent (and believe urban backlash to the ABC debate last Wednesday helps enormously).

Obama is also looking for solid support in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia, which is why Obama hopped aboard a train and gave speeches at and slow-rolled through numerous commuter train stops in the Philly suburbs.

But Obama must out-work and out-muscle the combined forces of Gov. Ed Rendell, a former mayor of Philadelphia, and the city’s current mayor, Michael Nutter. In the most important, vote-rich part of the state, Clinton has powerful allies who know where the votes are, how to mobilize them and how to motivate them.

The key question: how much political capital will Rendell and Nutter spend in Philadelphia when they know the social movement behind Obama is so strong there. Obama has mentioned at every stop since Friday the crowd of 35,000 he drew Friday night in Philadelphia. The message is clear to Rendell and Nutter — push against the tide of support at your own risk because these constituents and their long memories will be around after the presidential parade leaves Pennsylvania.

There’s one other factor to keep an eye on: who won the new registrant wars. About 165,000 new Democratic voters have registered for this primary since January. The Obama campaign says it has conducted a quietly effective registration drive in Philadelphia and intend to spring tens of thousands of new voters on Clinton.

This is a potential problem for Clinton. As her campaign readily acknowledges, turnout models in Pennsylvania are unreliable. The state hasn’t had a truly competitive Democratic presidential primary since 1976. Again, this is where Rendell and Nutter come in. If anyone in Pennsylvania knows who these new voters are and how to reach them in southeastern Pennsylvania, it is these two. The Clinton team would be far more worried about the X-factor of newly registered Democrats if they didn’t have Rendell and Nutter on their side.

One last point about Pennsylvania. Obama’s worked much harder here than he did in Ohio. Person-to-person contact and the Obama aura are still his best assets on the trail and he’s put them to exhaustive use in the closing hours, even coming up here to Scranton last night just to rattle Clinton’s cage in what’s supposed to be — and probably will be — Clinton country to the tune of 75 percent to 25 percent.

Corey O’Brien, a county commissioner in Lackawanna County, told me Obama made the trip to Scranton to prove he was ceding nothing to Clinton and to eat into Clinton’s base. O’Brien said if Obama can move Clinton down to the mid-60s in the Scranton area that will make his margins in the Philly area all the more important. Tactics like this were non-existent for Obama in Ohio and could make the difference between a 10-point or 12-point loss and a 6-point or 8-point loss.

And it is between these numbers, that Super Delegates, contributors and the news media will decide what happened in Pennsylvania, what it says about Obama’s general election prospects and if Clinton has earned her right to credibly continue her bid for the nomination

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I worked in Las Vegas as a reporter for the Review-Journal newspaper from 1986 to 1988 and appreciate the disdain all Nevadans have for cheap gambling metaphors glibly deployed by national reporters when discussing ANY Nevada-based story.

Tempting though it may be, I will avoid the corny gambling cliches as I describe the feeling on the ground here just about two hours before the Democratic caucuses begin.

First, there is some degree of unease in the Barack Obama camp about today’s result.

Second, I detect no preemptive triumphalism in the Clinton camp.

Third, the unions here are at daggers drawn and things could get a bit hostile at caucus sites on and off the Las Vegas Strip before the day is done.

Fourth, the Latino vote looms largest as the subset of voters most likely to determine the outcome. Public polls and internal polls in both campaigns show that vote splitting at least 65-35 for Clinton over Obama. The size of this turnout could spell the difference between victory and defeat.

Fifth, the Culinary Workers Union local 226 is, as expected, pulling out all the stops to help Obama win. But there is rising concern that two factors may limit Culinary’s clout in this hard-fought contest:

A. The endorsement may have come too late to translate the union’s organizing power into massive pro-Obama turnout (remember this fact: it’s much easier for a union to unify and mobilize its members on behalf of a fight for wages and benefits than it is on behalf of a political candidate their membership has little or no intrinsic commitment to). A key question looming over today’s caucuses is whether the Culinary endorsement was so close to the caucuses – just 10 days out — that there wasn’t time to fully mobilize union members on Obama’s behalf.

B. The lawsuit filed against the at-large precincts in nine casinos may have had two salutary affects on the Clinton campaign: the first, creating enough confusion about the process to render Culinary’s aggressive last-minute organizing less effective; and second, deepening pro-Clinton sentiment among Culinary members who disagreed with leadership’ s Obama endorsement. Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton just swept through the MGM casino and received a very warm reception among rank-and-file casino workers who eagerly grabbed leaflets Bill and Chelsea handed out explaining casino workers can caucus for any candidate — not just Obama.

Sixth, Rory Reid, son of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and leader of Hillary’s Nevada effort, has never wavered in his belief Nevada was winnable for Clinton. Right not, he appears as calmly confident as anyone in the Clinton camp. To his credit, Rory was calm even in the panic that set in when team Clinton feared it might lose New Hampshire and debated whether to fight hard for Nevada. Reid assured senior Clinton advisers Hillary could win no matter what happened in New Hampshire. Victory is by no means assured for Clinton here, but Rory may have been the one to keep his emotions in check the best and that, in the end, may prove very beneficial to Clinton.

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JOHNSTON, Iowa — Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman , Terry McAuliffe wants all those concerned to know all is well in camp Clinton.

“You know, you hear this in campaigns all the time, McAuliffe said, referring to persistent reports of turmoil, panic and back-biting as Hillary’s numbers slide in early primary and caucus states. “We are the front runner, everybody’s been going after us. We feel very good about where we are. I’m chairman of the campaign and I can tell you we are happy. Everybody’s working together. We’re all focused to get people to the polls on election day and getting them to vote for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice and the candidate who can bring change.”

Without prompting McAuliffe named names in how integrated things are in the Clinton campaign, and sounding very much like a general manager of a sports team, made sure to send a vote of confidence to campaign manager Patty Solis Doyle: “There could be 5 or 6 polls out on a day and Hillary could be up in four, but if we’re down in one, that one gets played. And then all of a sudden the campaign is in trouble. Everyone outside the campaign likes to make circular firing squads. I talk to the president every day, I talk to Hillary every day and I talk to Patty Solis almost every day. We’re all focused and working hard. People on the outside like to chatter, but you know that’s not going to get us off our mission of getting Hillary Clinton elected.”

As for Iowa, where Clinton climbed into a hard-fought lead this summer, but has seen her rise plateau and begin to erode, McAuliffe began the all-important task of managing expectations.

“You do the best you can, you lay it out. You can’t look at one state as being determinate on who’s going to be the nominee” McAuliffe said, responding to my direct question “Can Hillary afford to lose Iowa?”

“Iowa, great state, but if you remember, Bill Clinton did not campaign there in 1992 because Sen. Tom Harkin from Iowa was in the race. So with Hillary out there it’s actually the first time the Clinton operation actually is out there campaigning.”

Which brings us to New Hampshire: “It’s very important for us. New Hampshire is different. President Clinton did very well in New Hampshire, he was the come back kid. We have great roots there. The president was just there. Hillary’s been there many, many times. Obviously it’s a very important state for us, we’re going to do very well there.”

McAuliffe spoke to me before Clinton New Hampshire co-chair Billy Shaheen told The Washingon Post that Barack Obama’s past drug use (marijuana and cocaine) would cause electability problems because Republicans (not Democrats, mind you) would exploit the issue for political gain.

Interestingly, I asked McAuliffe about the long-running Clinton camp dialogue with reporters that there’s much more that voters need to know about Obama and that his electability once all these matters were known would look different than it does today. McAuliffe would have none of it.

“I don’t go out and attack other Democrats. It’s just not my nature. I’ll let the other candidates think for themselves but you know what? I gotta winner on my side, i got Hillary Clinton and you know what she’s got a lot of people counting on her and she is gonna do great when she ultimately gets elected to be president.”

McAuliffe didn’t hesitate, though, when I asked him if Hillary would run negative or “comparative” TV ads against Obama in New Hampshire on the issue of universal health care.

“We’re clearly going to talk about Hillary’s plan versus the other democrats, absolutely. Because health care, you know the Iraq war obviously is a top issue for folks, but on the domestic front I believe its health care and probably disposable income and the economy. On heath care, no one knows more about health care than Hillary Clinton. She has laid her plan out, she covers every single American. And the other Democratic plans don’t cover every single American (Garrett editorial insert: Obama’s plan doesn’t, John Edward’s plan does). Everybody gets covered under Hillary Clinton’s plan. That is a debate that you know we’ll engage in, gladly engage in that debate.”

So, on the eve of a crucial Iowa presidential debate, let’s review.

Clinton’s campaign is not panicked and there is no in-fighting; Iowa is a great state but “you do the best you can,”; New Hampshire made Bill Clinton and can make Hillary because it is “different” from Iowa because “we have great roots there”; there will be no attacking of Obama (by McAuliffe), but the campaign will atack on health care and that will be on TV and will probably wait until the race gets to New Hampshire.

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