Politics on the Hudson

“I got a little hot over the weekend in Cincinnati,’’ Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience of about 500 people in a Lorain, Ohio high school gymnasium.

Clinton was referring to her pointed criticism of an Ohio mailing by Barack Obama’s campaign on her health plan that she considered to be false, misleading and discredited.

“That is not the way to run a campaign to pick the Democratic nominee for president,’’ Clinton said at today’s town hall style campaign event.

Clinton reiterated her criticism that Obama’s health plan would leave out millions of people, allowing the uninsured to show up at a hospital emergency room and pass along the cost of their treatment as “a hidden tax’’ on everyone else.

If her midday campaign stop in Lorain was a tune-up for tonight’s 9 o’clock debate between Clinton at Cleveland State University, some sparks could fly.

Lorain – an old industrial city along Lake Erie that Clinton said has problems similar the New York cities of Buffalo and Jamestown she represents – has seen its population shrink in the wake of lost jobs in steel and auto manufacturing. The local school district laid off 240 public school teachers last year because of budget problems. The city’s mayor—who has endorsed Clinton—talked about the nation’s subprime mortgage crisis and the consequent spike in home foreclosures as a reason why places such as Lorain are having problems maintaining municipal revenues.

The setting was a perfect fit for Clinton’s fine-tuned message of populist solutions for the nation’s economic probems.

Clinton spouted statistics about Ohio’s housing crisis by noting the state is ninth in the nation in foreclosures; that foreclosures in the state increased 50 percent in January to 13,000 compared to the same month a year ago; and more than 150,000 households in the state have been hit by foreclosures.

Tomorrow she will host an economic forum in central Ohio.

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