HARRISBURG, PA. — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton nodded knowingly last week as Joe Rebarchek described his struggle to pay for his oldest daughter to attend Villanova University and still save tuition money for his two younger children.
"I hear about this everywhere," Clinton said at the Capitol Diner, her voice tinged with sadness.
The New York senator looked across the crowd of supporters in the '50s-style dining room with flying-saucer-like lights and said she was able to go to law school nearly 40 years ago only because she had a low-interest loan from the government.
"At that point in this country's history, we made a really big investment in young people," Clinton said. "That was a part of what our country did. And I want to get back to that."
There is a lot that Clinton wants to get back to these days.
On the presidential campaign trail, Clinton talks of reviving steel mills, rebuilding bridges, reprising the war bond campaign of the 1940s and recapturing the excitement of the Apollo space program in the '60s.
Clinton, a baby boomer born in 1947, did not initially campaign on the triumphs of America's past. But as she works to narrow Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, she is weaving a strain of nostalgia into her speeches.
Her message seems to resonate in states hit hard by the shutdown of once-booming factories.
"I got out of the Air Force in 1961, and I could barely afford to go to school. But I got a college degree with the GI Bill," said Bob Spencer, a 69-year-old retiree from Louisville, Ky., who applauded Clinton's invocation of the past at a rally last week. "I think that's what Democrats need to get back to."
Clinton decisively won Ohio last month on the strength of her support among white, working-class voters. And she is relying on them to sustain her candidacy in the next three months as the last states -- including Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia -- go to the polls before the primary season ends in June.
"Change has not been all that positive for a lot of people here over the last 20 years," said Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh. "Their kids may have moved away. Their factories may have shut. Their jobs may have disappeared.
"There are a lot of people here who fondly remember the old days," he said.
Clinton has family roots in the industrial heartland of eastern Pennsylvania, where her grandfather spent decades as a factory worker in Scranton.
