Clinton Intensifies Ground Work in Ind.

Morgan signed on and soon showed why Bayh wanted him. In March, he gathered 60 to 70 people to hear Bayh's pitch for Clinton. The next morning, Bayh addressed a group of local mayors at breakfast. As Morgan put it, "He'd been ginning it up all over the state."

Details and door-knocking count, Morgan said, in a race that polls show is deadlocked: "There have been people I talked to last month who were solid Obama and are now for Hillary, and vice versa. There are households that are split."

As Morgan spoke, Gina Piraccini arrived with a cardboard box filled with the makings of campaign buttons and 500 circles snipped by hand from colored paper. She was getting ready for Saturday's Clinton rally at the local minor league baseball stadium.

One by one, Piraccini placed a round metal backing on a heavy press, then aligned a circle of paper on top. She leaned her weight into a long lever and produced buttons that said, "Homerun Hillary" and, especially for Michigan supporters, "My Vote for Hillary Should Count."

Piraccini, a school psychologist, finished one badge and said, "Green. Very grass-rooty."

Estelle Olson is the sort of campaign volunteer more typically found in the Obama camp. A Minnesota community college student, she is working in her fourth state as a Clinton road warrior. She started in Minnesota, then moved to Ohio and Pennsylvania before arriving in South Bend last week.

"My poor husband, he thought I was coming home after Pennsylvania," Olson said between telephone calls at the Clinton campaign's storefront office. "Once I saw how drawn along gender lines this campaign had become, I barraged my professors to please give me my finals online."

Olson comes from a conservative Christian household near Minneapolis. Her mother, she said, "is ashamed of me for being here." As she made calls asking people to attend Saturday's rally, she recorded successes and failures on an automated telephone system.

From offices in the likes of Fort Wayne, Kokomo and Evansville, staffers and volunteers focus on telling Clinton's story and trying to convince voters that she is best positioned to win in November and solve their problems. They run door-knocking operations to deliver early voters and produce crowds for Clinton and her surrogates.

Yet for all the recent effort by the Clinton campaign, Obama's campaign has broken more fresh ground in building grass-roots operations throughout the country. Obama's staff has harnessed the Internet to link supporters by shared interest and geography while giving them license to shape their own tactics.

"The Obama movement pushes local people to take the active role," said Oliver Davis, a South Bend city council member who drafted his supporters to campaign for Obama. "We went after the everyday Joe."

Davis, one of at least five Obama supporters on the nine-member council, credits ground-level organizing for his own victory. While he says Clinton's campaign "is catching up in terms of the ground game," he contends that Obama will benefit from a head start here.