Clinton: People 'live in the short run'

MERRILLVILLE, Ind. -- Hillary Clinton brought her populist message today to northwest Indiana, a region with a high concentration of Democratic voters. Obama, whose Chicago home is less than an hour away, is expected to need healthy margins here if he hopes to win Indiana, but Clinton has campaigned aggressively to try to erase his advantage.

Using a red firetruck as a backdrop, Clinton defended her proposal for a summer gas-tax holiday before several hundred supporters at a fire station in Merrillville. She again criticized Obama for focusing on long-term energy solutions at the expense of urgent, if modest, relief for working families.

"It's a false choice, as my opponents and others are trying to say: 'Oh, we can't do anything in the short run to help people; we can only worry about what we do in the long run,'" Clinton said. "People live in the short run. People get up every day and have to fill up their tanks. They have to go to the grocery store."

A few minutes later, Clinton hit Obama again on the issue, saying he did not understand what people are going through. "He's always going on TV, and he's always saying, 'Oh, you know, this is like $20," she said. "For a lot of people, $20 is something, right?"

That message resonated with voters like Karen Wilhelm, a 47-year-old from nearby Valparaiso who is living on disability. "To people in Indiana, even if it's a little bit, it helps."

As she has at other recent appearances, Clinton added a little down-home inflection to her voice in today's pitch: "This country is worth getting up every day and workin’ for, isn’t it?"

For the next 24 hours, though, she's asking people to work for her. As her introducer, Senator Evan Bayh, put it: "We've got 24 hours to go in this campaign, and at this point it's not about those of us up here anymore. It's about all of you. Her fate is in your hands."