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BAMA-GEDDON IN HILL AD

SCRANTON, Pa. – Hillary Rodham Clinton played the fear card yesterday, unleashing a TV ad featuring wars, natural disasters – and even Osama bin Laden – in her latest and most aggressive effort to cast doubt on Barack Obama‘s ability to handle a crisis.

In the first time that a Democratic candidate has used an image of the terror master in an ad in the 2008 presidential race, Clinton contends that only she is ready to deal with disasters.

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The Obama campaign immediately charged her camp with using fear to “score political points,” as both candidates blitzed across Pennsylvania on their final day of campaigning before today’s primary vote.

The ad was a remarkable escalation in an increasingly angry contest between the two Democrats.

“It’s the toughest job in the world,” intones the Clinton ad’s deep-voiced narrator, as black-and-white images of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the stock-market crash, long gas lines in the 1970s, and former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev flash across the screen.

The spot then shows familiar footage of bin Laden stalking the hills of Afghanistan. Images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath are also shown.

“You need to be ready for anything – especially now, with two wars, oil prices skyrocketing and an economy in crisis,” says the ad, which does not mention Obama by name.

Obama’s team responded furiously and unveiled its own ad.

“When Sen. Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision . . . and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “It’s ironic that she would borrow the president’s tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points. We already have a president who plays the politics of fear, and we don’t need another.”

The Obama camp distributed a poster from Bill Clinton’s and Al Gore’s 1992 campaign that reads: “Vote your hopes, not your fears.”

Sen. Clinton herself has slammed Republicans for using bin Laden to scare up votes.

“With respect to the Republicans using Osama bin Laden and other terrorists as part of their political scare tactics, I find it very disappointing,” Clinton said during her 2006 Senate re-election campaign.

Obama’s response ad hit the air by yesterday afternoon.

“Who made the right judgment about opposing the war and had the courage and character to speak honestly about it? And who, in times of challenge, will unite us – not use fear and calculation to divide us?” the ad asks.

Previous uses of bin Laden in campaign ads has sometimes created an uproar.

Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss used bin Laden footage in withering ads against former Dem. Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, in 2002, infuriating Democrats in Congress.

Rudy Giuliani ran an ad featuring bin Laden and wreckage at the World Trade Center in his failed campaign this year.

geoff.earle@nypost.com

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