Clinton and Obama travel a populist route

Sixteen years ago, Clinton accompanied her husband as he barnstormed across the country in his first presidential run, scolding a Bush administration that they said was neglecting a beleaguered American middle class.

She dug back into that populist rhetoric Monday in stops in Wisconsin, talking up her solutions to the nation's economic ills as Obama was doing the same in Youngstown, serving up his own fiery economic pitch.

In the last week, Clinton's campaign has become markedly populist in tone as she has emphasized economic themes to win over anxious blue-collar voters in the Wisconsin primary and in the crucial upcoming contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama has taken much the same tack in the economically squeezed states. As the candidates aim for the same base of voters, they have tangled more and more in barbed broadsides over their stances on international trade agreements, mortgage foreclosures and economic dislocation.

"You know," Clinton told an audience at a chili parlor in Cincinnati on Friday, "I see people on TV saying, 'Why is she so upset?' "

She spent an hour criticizing the Bush administration ("government of the few, for the few, by the few"), decrying the death of the middle class ("it's time we had a president who is a fighter, a doer and a champion of the middle class"), and comforting a sobbing mother whose home is in foreclosure ("these people work five, six days a week").

In Youngstown on Monday, Obama sounded much the same, highlighting the economic malaise gripping the battered industrial belt of northeast Ohio.

"People are desperate," Obama said. "You see it and hear it in Youngstown, but not just in Youngstown. It's everywhere."

Economic populism was a key plank of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential win, stamped in the reminder that was always on display in the candidate's Little Rock, Ark., war room: "It's the economy, stupid."

But the Clintons are now the political establishment, backed by big donors, and are wealthy enough that Hillary Clinton lent her campaign $5 million last month.