Well-heeled liberal Democrats are desperate to see Senator Hillary Clinton through the door. But she refuses to go. Having won Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, she now lives to fight until May 6 when the next primaries in North Carolina and Indiana are due.

That she would win in Pennsylvania was never in doubt. Clinton sceptics wanted to know if she could generate a substantive lead over Senator Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. Having secured a ten percentage point lead over Obama, Clinton sees no reason to quit.

Conventional wisdom throws seemingly solid math at her. It runs as follows: Despite Clinton’s good showing in Pennsylvania she cannot catch up with Obama’s lead either in the popular vote or the delegate count. She is also running out of money. If politics was math, robots would be running modern democracies. The very thrill of democratic politics lies in its unpredictability.

Clinton is trying to turn the conventional wisdom on its head. She is asking why Obama is unable to “close the sale” with the Democratic party voters. By underlining that Obama has not been able to win the big states that matter in the November elections, Clinton hopes to convince the super delegates that Obama is unelectable.

White working classes

The one important group that has kept Clinton’s candidacy alive and cast a shadow over Obama’s campaign is the white working class. According to exit polls in Pennsylvania, Clinton won 75 per cent of the vote from white Democrats with a high school diploma or less — three times Obama’s vote among these voters — compared to 56 per cent of those with more education.

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