Obama Spends Heavily
...by nearly two to one in the two states. That is helping him eat deeply into double-digit leads she held in polls just weeks ago.
But after a month in which she raised $32 million a remarkable amount, but still less than the $50 million or more brought in by Mr. Obama Mrs. Clinton is fighting back.
The expenditures of the two Democratic presidential candidates, combined with a travel schedule that sent them and their surrogates from border to border in Texas and Ohio, reflect the expectation that the voting this week may be climactic. Mrs. Clinton's advisers have suggested that she will bow out of the race if she falters in either state, after 11 straight losses.
Their face-offs are not just on television. Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has a town-hall-style meeting Sunday afternoon in Westerville, Ohio. Mrs. Clinton, of New York, just announced one there, too. Mr. Obama will be at Westerville Central High School, Mrs. Clinton at Westerville North High School.
Polls show that the race is deadlocked in Texas. Mrs. Clinton's lead in Ohio has been whittled away, though she does still lead.
"Senator Obama is spending a lot of money on TV; if this can be purchased, he can win it," Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, a Democrat who has campaigned across the state with Mrs. Clinton, said in an interview. "I think we've survived the initial blast of the Obama phenomenon, and we're now holding steady."
In a sign of Mr. Obama's confidence and his strategy of amassing delegates wherever he can, he spent part of Saturday in Rhode Island, which with Vermont also votes on Tuesday.
Aides to Mrs. Clinton said she remained confident of winning the Ohio and Texas contests and would press on with her campaign, as signaled by her increasingly tough attacks on Mr. Obama.
But Clinton advisers have recently pointed to Mr. Obama's financial advantage, in what appears to...
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