The great big Pennsylvania primary election happens tomorrow, and I couldn't be gladder, because at least it will be over.

Hillary is ahead of Obama here, and she has always been ahead. She'll win, but the only question is by how much. According to the punditry, if she wins by double digits, she may be able to claim not only a moral victory, but a real victory. If not, then the status quo continues.....

Bill Bradley sums it up pretty well:

Hillary needs a very big win [in PA] to make any dent in Obama's lead in earned delegates and the popular vote. Even if she gets that, it's hard to see her making up much ground elsewhere in the other contests remaining between now and June 3rd, when Montana and South Dakota close out the primary and caucus season.

The primary in Pennsylvania has got to be the last stand: not only has the state always been one where Mrs Clinton should, if she was to maintain any credibility at all, have had a strong win but it is now going to be a telling indication of how much damage has been done to Barack Obama by his disastrously misjudged comments about small-town, working-class Americans.

If you do not have the advantage of having been born and raised in America as I was - that is, if you are familiar only with British cultural assumptions - you may not fully appreciate why Mr Obama's remarks caused the political earthquake that they did or why they have been subjected to even more detailed exegesis than his previous most important utterances after the Rev Jeremiah Wright debacle.

To the British analyst (Janet Daley), the remarks illustrate more about the deterioration of the American bourgeiose than anything else:

In Britain, such sentiments about working-class people are expressed every day by politicians of all parties. They are the common currency of the patronising Left-wing snobbery that pours out of every orifice of the BBC.

Indeed, in the terms that Mr Obama gave to them, they would be seen as the kinder paternalistic version of the disdain that takes really visceral forms in more robustly contemptuous circles (for which organs such as the Guardian speak).

He clearly believed himself to be offering a sympathetic account of why Americans in (or out of) blue-collar jobs turned into gun-totin', Bible-bashing, benighted bigots. And given that he was addressing what was supposed to be a closed fund-raising meeting in San Francisco, we must assume that he believed himself to be among friends who would all discuss the redneck issue with frank loathing: by their standards he was being pretty gentle.

Since the Sixties, when a diluted and incoherent Marxist ideology took hold of higher education, and university became a Left-liberal sheep-dip through which every middle-class professional had to pass, respectability in America has generally involved contempt for precisely the people Mr Obama characterised as being so ignorant that they could not even understand the causes of their economic disadvantage.

In her analysis of this farrago, the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan has written: "To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind."

In other words, if you are somebody who came up from poverty, you cannot afford to buck the intellectual hegemony of right-thinking people (which is to say, Left-thinking people).

So yes, the US has discovered bourgeois guilt. It now has an educated class that believes, in the face of all the comparative evidence, that Big Government and enforced wealth redistribution must be the answers to poverty and that the wealth that is created by free markets is somehow tainted.

To hold on to socially or economically conservative views in this climate is to risk appearing backward - common, vulgar and comically downmarket.

But speaking of Marxist ideology and bourgeois guilt, what about Obama's terrorist friendship connection? Do the voters care? Shhh! We really shouldn't talk about that too loudly, or the voters might start wondering about terrorist pardons. (So let's us Democrats just agree not to talk too loudly about that one, OK?)

Obama thought he was on safe ground in San Francisco, of course, and he said what the downtrodden bitter classes all know he thinks anyway, but is too slick to admit. I think the reason "Bittergate" doesn't seem to have made as much of a dent in Obama's polls is because most Democratic voters are quite used to that attitude. In fact, here's the way the elitist newspapers like to portray them:

Of course, that's a pro-Hillary cartoon, but there's nothing unusual about that type of condescending sentiment. It's numbingly typical among Democrats, and Democratic voters are smart enough to realize that Hillary -- in her heart of hearts (yes, I'm assuming she has one) -- would think in a manner not much different from Obama. Plus, she's said "the wrong thing" so many times that it's tough for the voters to keep track.

This phenomenon -- of being caught saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place -- brings up another issue, which is changing American politics. No one can get away with anything anymore:

....the old saying - that nothing is illegal unless you get caught - is out of date; with the preponderance of blogs, cable news networks, embeded reporters and more media attention to this campaign than any in history, everything will get caught.

There's another wrinkle to everybody being caught, and that is the backlash that can be created against the beneficiary of the attack:

In this groundbreaking year, in which one of three new precedents will be set, whisper campaigns threatening peril if any come to pass are sure to play a role. But while those underground smear attempts could hurt each candidate at which they are aimed, the benefiting opponent could find him or herself damaged in the backlash: Even if the offending group or individual is not associated with the campaign and merely tied to the party, a failure to respond fast enough could be grounds for criticism. This year, when everyone will be attacked unfairly, it could be the strength of the disavowal that proves more important than the offended candidate's outrage and response.

But there's another psychological wildcard in the related phenomenon of voter fatigue. I could be wrong about this, but people seemed more tired of Hillary a few weeks ago than they do now. Obama is seeming more like a broken record, while Hillary seems endlessly capable of reinventing herself. He also seems not to handle combat well, but she seems to thrive on it.

The longer she remains an underdog, the more likable she becomes.

What worries me is that Hillary is very capable of winning the nomination, and if she wins the nomination, I fear she will be unbeatable by McCain.

But then, I have a penchant for looking on the dark side.

MORE: Speaking of Hillary's unbeatability, Jeralyn at TalkLeft says that "Hillary Clinton is the better candidate to beat John McCain this fall," and has a post titled "Electability: Why Hillary Is More Likely to Beat McCain" which lays it out.

(HT Glenn Reynolds.)

For the umpteenth time, any crossover Republicans who vote for Hillary in the primary either want the GOP to lose, or are not thinking clearly.

MORE: Nora Ephron's view of white men echoes the dualistic bigotry reflected in the above cartoon:

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

As I said when I first linked the cartoon,

No matter how they vote, they're suspect!

They simply cannot win.

If I were a white male Democrat, I might be starting to learn how it feels to be a Republican.