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California/Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: US Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton accused each other on Saturday of waging negative campaigns as they sped across Pennsylvania before next week's potentially make-or-break primary election.
Obama, an Illinois senator who is the party's national front-runner but trails in Pennsylvania, hopes an upset on Tuesday will hand him the Democratic nomination and knock Clinton out of the race for the right to face Republican John McCain in the November election.
After a week that included a contentious television debate that focused on issues such as his controversial former pastor and recent relationship with a 1960s radical, Obama pounded on the New York senator at various stops throughout the day for using negative tactics and changing positions on key issues.
Miserable place
"What's happened is that Senator Clinton has internalised a lot of the strategies, the tactics that have made Washington such a miserable place where all we do is bicker and all we do is fight," he told a rally in Paoli, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.
He described the former first lady's tactics as: "We're going to throw whatever we want at Barack, whether it's true, whether it's false, whether it's exaggerated, whether it's relevant, because that's, according to Senator Clinton, what the Republicans will do."
The Clinton campaign returned fire, saying an Obama ad deliberately misrepresented her health care policy and taking umbrage at comments by a US general and Obama supporter who said Clinton lacked the "moral authority" to lay a wreath on a soldier's grave.
"He always says in his speeches that he's running a positive campaign, but then his campaign does the opposite," Clinton told a rally in the town of California in southwestern Pennsylvania, referring to Obama.
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