Clinton reaches out to middle-class voters

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Barnstorming through small-town Iowa yesterday, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton sought to shore up her weakest flanks by making an intense plea for the support of middle-class voters with an increasingly populist message on taxes, trade, and the economy.

Her speech on the economy to a heavily union crowd was an implicit rebuttal to charges, especially from rival John Edwards, that she is a corporate Democrat beholden to lobbyists and more interested in Wall Street.

The wife of the president who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement also vowed to review trade agreements every five years to make sure they are fair to American workers. She brought several rows of letter carriers and other union members to their feet with her proposal for an "Employee Free Choice Act" that would strengthen workers. And riding a campaign bus dubbed the "Middle Class Express," she went out of her way to say she would end President Bush's tax cuts for the richest Americans.

"The pressures of stagnant wages, rising health, education and energy costs, increased household debt, and a softening housing market are creating a trap-door economy," she said. "Too many families are standing on that trap door, just one health crisis, just one pink slip, just one missed mortgage payment away from falling through and losing everything they've worked for."

But she still faces plenty of skepticism, especially among the many antiwar voters who point to her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war.

On Sunday in New Hampton, she went back and forth four times with a man who insisted that her vote for a resolution that labeled Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group gives Bush the authority to go to war. The New York senator said her vote last month was to help increase diplomatic pressure on Iran to give up a suspected nuclear weapons program. But Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who are also running for president, voted against the resolution; Senator Barack Obama has said he would have voted against it had he been present for the vote; and Edwards has also criticized her vote.

While Clinton is way ahead in national polls and in the first primary state of New Hampshire, in Iowa she's locked in a tough three-way race with Edwards and Obama. She broke through to first place in the latest poll, released Sunday by the Des Moines Register, with 29 percent of likely caucus voters supporting her, compared with 23 percent for Edwards and 22 percent for Obama.

At every stop on the stump, Clinton has been careful to ask Iowans humbly for their support, knowing that like New Hampshire voters, they often don't like just filing behind the front-runner.

"I can't do it without your help," she told a crowd in a sweltering middle school gymnasium Sunday night in Maquoketa. "I'm working hard for every single vote. I don't take anything for granted."

Yet at the same time, Clinton continues to exude the confidence of a nominee-to-be, with more comments along the lines of "when I'm president" than "if I'm president." Not only has she not criticized any of her Democratic rivals, last night in Boone, Iowa, she said, "we have such great candidates running."

She spends much of her stump speech attacking Bush, not only on the economy and the war but for cronyism and mismanagement.

"I feel like I'm going to get to the Oval Office and pick up the rug and say, 'Oooh my goodness, look at the mess they've left!' " she exclaimed in Maquoketa.

Despite her above-the-fray tendencies, Clinton had a surprisingly sharp response to Randall Rolph, 56, who challenged her on Iran. She suggested he had been planted by a rival campaign.

"What you read to me, which somebody obviously sent you . . ." she started, before he angrily denied someone had given him the question. They went back and forth twice more, with Rolph repeating that the resolution enabled Bush to go to war with Iran. She shot back sternly, "I'm sorry sir, it does not!"

Rolph said afterward that he is far from making up his mind about whom to support in the Democratic caucus, but that Clinton's answer had lost her his vote.

Most of those interviewed after Clinton's campaign stops yesterday and Sunday, however, found her more convincing.

"She's talking about the real people instead of the top echelon," said Barbara Feller, 58, an amateur historian from Robins, Iowa. Feller walked into the Cedar Rapids speech undecided but left leaning strongly toward Clinton. "I just like the idea of the middle class being given a voice, being given credit for what they do."

As much as he liked Clinton's stump speech in Maquoketa, Clayton Pederson, 54, a high school German and Spanish teacher, is leaning toward Edwards.

"It would be good to keep a couple of the other candidates around for a few more primary rounds," he said.

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.