Cash becomes Clinton's Achilles heel

Hillary Clinton needs a big win in Pennsylvania on Tuesday if she is to raise enough cash to keep her campaign on the road, according to election analysts and a breakdown of her own filings to the Federal Election Commission.

Mrs Clinton, who had just $8.6m (€5.4m, £4.3m) of cash on hand at the beginning of the month compared with $42.5m for Barack Obama, has been spending an average of roughly $1m a day in the past few weeks, according to independent estimates.

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"I have long thought that money - or lack of it - could end up being the deciding factor in this Democratic race," said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns. "If Senator Clinton does not win by a large enough margin in Pennsylvania then there have to be serious questions about whether she can continue."

Mrs Clinton's financial picture looks even worse when debt is included. Her campaign is more than $10m in the red, more than half of which is owed to the polling firm of which Mark Penn, her former senior strategist, is a partner.

In contrast, Mr Obama's online fund-raising machine can go back repeatedly to small donors who have donated well below the legal limit. Forty per cent of the $235m that Mr Obama has raised since the start of the campaign has come in sums of $200 or less, compared with 23 per cent of the $189m that Mrs Clinton has raised.

Election analysts say that Mrs Clinton would need to win by at least a double-digit margin in Pennsylvania on Tuesday to instill enough confidence in new donors that her campaign is still worth funding.

"There is no question that Mrs Clinton has to perform very well in Pennsylvania to continue to raise money to carry on," said Sheila Krumholz, head of The Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors election funding. "This is really the crunch moment for her campaign."

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Mr Obama is more than 800,000 votes ahead of Mrs Clinton overall and has a lead of roughly 150 delegates in the pledged delegate count. Barring a series of improbably crushing defeats, Mr Obama is likely to be ahead on both counts at the end of the primary calendar on June 3.

Cash is Hillary's achilles heel. The HRC campaign is broke, desperate and today , they've deployed the Bin Laden card.

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"