Clinton tailors messages for Ohio, Texas

Hillary Clinton is all about the economy in Ohio and all about national security in Texas -- at least on the airwaves.

In one new TV ad on the eve of the make-or-break contests, Clinton uses Barack Obama's acknowledgment during last week's MSNBC debate that he hadn't held an oversight hearing on the Afghanistan conflict as chairman of a Senate subcommittee because he has been running for president.

"Hillary Clinton will never be too busy to defend our national security," the narrator intones.

Texas, where defense is a big industry and a robust military a priority, is also where Clinton is airing the ad that shows sleeping children and asks voters who they want in the White House to answer the 3 a.m. crisis call.

UPDATE: Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, in a conference call organized by the Obama campaign, said this afternoon that the Clinton ads are disingenous and the kind one would expect Republicans to be running, not Democrats.

"This is really grasping at straws," said Kerry, who also appeared on CNN on Sunday to defend Obama against the 3 a.m. ad.

Representative Chet Edwards of Texas chimed in on the conference call, calling the spots "the kind of TV commercials that Karl Rove would be proud of."

Edwards said Texas voters will reject what he called the "politics of fearmongering and politics of diversion."

In Clinton's new TV spot in Ohio, which is reeling from manufacturing job losses, workers talk about the need for new leadership. "It's time the American worker had a partner in the White House," Clinton says in the ad.