Good Monday morning. The long national purgatory is almost over. Just wait another 36 hours and we'll all be alright. Ahead of tomorrow's vote, here's what Washington is watching:

-- The Senate will meet today, but no roll call votes will be taken. The House is out of session, returning to work tomorrow. President Bush will address a reception benefiting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Later, he will meet today with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in New Orleans. With all the talk lately among Democrats about what to do over NAFTA, the three leaders should have some interesting discussions.

-- Twenty-four hours before voters head to the polls in Pennsylvania, the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has devolved into a mud-slinging contest. According to some reports, the vast majority of Clinton's ad buys in the state are negative, and an increasing amount of Barack Obama's ads are taking the same tone. In dueling statewide tours, Obama is calling Clinton a compromised Washington insider, as the New York Times' Zeleny and Seelye put it, and Clinton is complaining that Obama's finally gone negative. One thing Pennsylvania seems to ensure is that, as Nancy Pelosi predicted, Obama and Clinton will not be sharing a ticket this year.

-- The latest RCP Pennsylvania Average shows Clinton with a narrow 5.3-point lead over Obama, a gap that continues to shrink as the day of reckoning gets closer. But remember that Obama has never climbed above 45% in any poll taken in the Keystone State, suggesting he has a ceiling in the state. One way to reduce any shortfall of votes is to bolster turnout in Philadelphia, where Obama has sent several veteran organizers. But that may not be enough to catch up to Clinton, who is consistently polling in the upper 40s compared with Obama, mired somewhere south of 45.

-- Make no mistake, Clinton is ahead in Pennsylvania, and while her margin is not the 15-point gap it was last month, it's still significant, especially given that Obama has a hard time breeching 45%. Many have seemingly planned for an Obama win, either an outright win or a narrow loss, spun as a moral victory. But Clinton is in good position despite being outspent at least $10 million to $4 million on television ads, and despite Obama's strong efforts to win the state. Obama drew 35,000 to a rally on Friday night, and his whistle-stop train tour this weekend generated big headlines. In fact, he's spent about 20 days in the state, equal to what Clinton has. Clinton's spinners are saying a win is a win, regardless of the margin. Given that Obama has focused so much on Pennsylvania, the Clinton talking points are closer to the truth.

-- Clinton spinners want you to remember that a win is a win is a win, but some of her other, more prominent surrogates need to be given another lecture on how to keep their yaps shut. "Not to put any pressure on you folks, but this is it, this is it. We're gonna we win, no doubt about it, but we gotta win big," Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell told his candidate's backers in York, Pennsylvania, per Marc Ambinder. The campaign's inability to get Rendell to stay on message, coupled with the candidate's husband's tendency to spout off on his own predictions of the importance of each and every win, and the importance of big margins, speaks again to their inability to control expectations. Perhaps the media is just swallowing Obama's expectations more easily, but the Clintons aren't making their case as well as they could be.

-- But a win for Clinton doesn't mean a huge closing of the delegate gap. Obama holds a 140-delegate lead in the latest RCP count, and a relatively close Clinton win -- by which we mean not a three-to-one blowout -- is not going to change the delegate calculus very much, as the Allentown Morning Call's Josh Drobnyk wrote yesterday. The state awards about a third of its delegates proportionally based on the statewide results and the remaining two-thirds based, again proportionately, on results by Congressional district. The 158 delegates up for grabs tomorrow is the biggest prize left this year, but irrespective of a sense of momentum, it's unlikely to really shake up the race's hard numbers.

-- After Pennsylvania, party leaders are going to start the real push, the Wall Street Journal's Jackie Calmes writes, to get uncommitted super delegates off the fence and into one camp or the other. When convention fights have taken place in the past, in 1968, 1972 and 1980, the Democratic nominee has lost, and regardless of the winner of the remaining primaries this year, Clinton is not going to be allowed to take her argument to the convention floor if those party heads have anything to say about it. "Do you think for one minute that Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid will allow this fight to go on and on and on?" Democratic super-strategist Donna Brazile asked. Just to be clear, she doesn't think so.

-- While Obama and Clinton spend millions beating the snot out of each other, John McCain is adding cash, and for the first time in more than a year ended a reporting period with eight figures in the bank. Reports due last night show McCain with $11.6 million in the bank after pulling in $15.4 million in March. McCain's bank loan is paid off, There's still a big gap, though: Obama had $51 million on hand at the beginning of April, the New York Times points out, and though he's spent a lot of that money in Pennsylvania, he will still have a huge financial advantage over McCain. Clinton, reports showed, raised $20.9 million in March, spent $22.3 million and closed the month with $31.7 million left over. No wonder, then, that Clinton is being outspent so heavily in Pennsylvania.

-- Non-Issue Of The Day: A front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post suggested something many already suspected strongly: That John McCain has a bit of a temper. Stories of McCain's blow-ups are legion, involving figures like Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran and others. Once again demonstrating how close he is to the Senator, top aide Mark Salter threw in his rebuttal, in the form of an email to National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru. But the reason the story will stick around, at least for a while, is that instead of just rehashing old arguments (Old? Cochran made his spine-tingling comments in about October), the article added to the library of reputed incidents, going to show that any time a good argument can be recounted later, it will be. Even the top denizens of Capitol Hill, at their core, are little more than gossips who love People Magazine.

-- Today On The Trail: Clinton is hitting the major markets today, with rallies in Scranton, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Clinton appears tonight on CNN's Larry King Live. Obama meets with families in Blue Bell, followed by a town hall meeting in McKeesport and a rally in Pittsburgh. Tonight, Obama will hit The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. McCain will speak to voters and the media at the St. James Hotel in Selma, before visiting Alabama Southern Community College, in Thomasville, Alabama, as the first day of his off-the-beaten-path tour kicks off.