RADNOR TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Hillary Clinton says Barack Obama is "a good man, and I respect him greatly." But in her final push for Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, Clinton is portraying her rival in a very different light: as a phony.
She is blanketing the state with an ad attacking Obama's boast, delivered in one of his TV commercials, that he does not accept campaign contributions from oil companies.
"No candidate does," Clinton's ad accurately points out, since corporate donations are against the law, and she goes on to list thousands of dollars in individual contributions to Obama from oil company executives.
Clinton is relentlessly attacking the front-runner as she tries to protect her lead in a state she cannot afford to lose. But the effort has come at a cost to Clinton and, possibly, Obama as well.
Some leading Democratic politicians, mainly Obama supporters, have expressed concern that party divisions are hardening and could make it more difficult to defeat John McCain in November, a sentiment echoed by ordinary voters.
"Chances are, it'll end up being McCain vs. Obama, and she's kind of helping McCain out," said Michael Byrns, 30, a research scientist who took his 4-month-old son to a Clinton rally that drew about a thousand people recently in Northeast Philadelphia.
"It scares me to see Democrats going at each other, even though you expect that to some extent," said Larry Vaksman, 57, who attended a Clinton event in this affluent Philadelphia suburb in hopes of quizzing the candidate about her vote to authorize the war in Iraq.
Voters such as Barbra Shotel, an ardent Clinton supporter, embody the fears of these Democrats. She said that if Obama becomes the nominee, she doesn't know whether she can bring herself to vote for him, based on her concerns about Obama's 20 years as a member of Jeremiah Wright's Southside Chicago church.
"Yes, I could" vote for McCain, said Shotel, a lawyer who gives her age as "of Hillary's generation." She said she has split her ticket in the past and supported Arlen Specter, the state's socially moderate Republican senator.
Clinton, asked by a voter during a town-hall style event in the Radnor High gym about bringing Democrats back together, said she'd "work very hard to have a unified" party in the fall.
National opinion surveys hint at the magnitude of the task. Almost one in three Clinton supporters say they would vote for McCain over Obama, according to the Gallup poll, and about one in five Obama supporters would defect if Clinton is nominated.
