They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything.

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Faltering Economy Plays to a Clinton Strength

FORT WAYNE, Ind.

All politicians talk about jobs, but these days Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton does it with tactile, almost sensuous detail. She began a rally here on Saturday morning with memories of her father’s fabric-printing business, feeling aloud the cloth, the silk screen and the squeegee he used to create patterns that would decorate strangers’ drapes.

“I’m trying to paint a word picture, and when I think about helping my dad at his print plant, it’s very physical, the memories,” she recalled in an interview after the crowds had dispersed.

Mrs. Clinton has spent her whole life climbing the ladders of education, wealth and power. Now, as part of her effort to hold off Senator Barack Obama and claim the Democratic presidential nomination, she is climbing back down them, sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has hung on in part by asserting that Mr. Obama cannot win the crucial category of white working-class Democrats. Those men and women won her the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, and for the logic of her campaign to hold, they must again side with her in Indiana, where polls suggest the race could be tight.

So every speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” she said, always to thunderous applause.

In Bloomington, she promised to bring nothing less than economic revolution to the decaying Rust Belt. “You’ve heard of white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs,” she told her Fort Wayne audience, setting up a line about how efforts to address global warming and other environmental problems could spawn new industries. “We’re going to create green-collar jobs.”

At a union hall in garbage-strewn Gary, Mrs. Clinton began her early-evening speech looking wan. But as she began talking about magnets and wheel bases, her eyes grew rounder and her small hands danced with expressive energy. She sounded as if, once she is done with the presidency business, she might like to try the steel one, joining those in the audience wearing “Women of Steel” T-shirts.

Since the race started, Mrs. Clinton has cycled through several political personas: the battle-tested White House veteran, the fighter, the girl — her word — tougher than any boy. Now she is the Dream Boss: the one who will give you a job and provide health insurance, but also understand just how hard you work and the mundane details of what you do. Mrs. Clinton has a reputation as an effective listener, and she is finally putting that skill to full use in her appearances, showing her audiences how closely she tracks their concerns.

“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” she said in the interview. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.”

At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”

In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

“So this is not just about steel,” she finished.

Next, she shared the alarming news that American radiologists are losing jobs because X-rays are being sent electronically to India. But according to Frank Levy, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is only one firm in India that reads American images. The overseas radiologists who read American images are generally United States citizens themselves, Mr. Levy said, because doctors who have not passed American boards cannot be insured against malpractice.

In these speeches, Mrs. Clinton moves smoothly from her audience’s job concerns to her own.

“Think about other important personnel decisions you have made,” Mrs. Clinton urges, like choosing a surgeon to operate on a loved one or a negotiator for a new union contract.

She never mentions just who the Democrats should be having second thoughts about. Instead she talks about her husband’s years in office, playing on the prosperity that most voters enjoyed during the 1990s.

“Each time a Bush became president, I was laid off,” said Bill Campbell, 42, a machine operator who came to hear Mrs. Clinton speak in Bloomington. “When Bill was president, I did well.”

Mr. Campbell was far from the only man in the crowd, but in Bloomington and elsewhere, the men were significantly outnumbered. In particular, nurses and teachers flooded Mrs. Clinton’s events. “I’m a schoolteacher and she does her homework,” said Nancy White, 69, in Bloomington.

Nearly all the crowds were large — several seemed to cross the thousand-person mark — and noisily appreciative.

After the event in Fort Wayne, Mrs. Clinton greeted supporter after ardent supporter waiting in the chilly wind, her quilted black Chanel-style coat and subtly highlighted hairdo contrasting with the many untended dye jobs and chapped, makeup-less faces.

“I was going to go to Wellesley, but I was going to have to pay back so much,” a young woman told her.

Another locked eyes with the candidate and mouthed a message: You’re going to win, she said silently.