Clinton, Obama make 'final push' for Ind. votes

INDIANAPOLIS — As he sank a basket in a pickup hoops game on Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama told the crowd, "I'm a pressure player."
That would be handy, because the pressure is on in Indiana, where polls show Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary to be a virtual tossup between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In a reflection of the competitive race, Obama chastised Clinton for her plan to suspend gas taxes, which he called a "classic Washington gimmick," in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
Clinton has proposed lifting the tax on gasoline during the summer and making up the revenue with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Obama has said that the tax would not save Americans much money and that oil companies would likely raise prices.
'What I've proposed is that the oil companies pay the gas tax instead of consumers and drivers this summer," Clinton said on ABC's This Week.
When asked to name an economist who supports her proposal, Clinton said, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists. … We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."
A Clinton campaign ad now airing here says her plan would save $8 billion. An Obama ad launched Sunday accused Clinton of taking the low road in attacking him and said her plan is a "gimmick" that won't do much for motorists.
Obama also criticized Clinton for saying the United States should "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel.
"It's not the language that we need right now, and I think it's language that's reflective of George Bush. We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk," he said.
Clinton, on This Week, said she had no regrets about her stand.
"Why would I have any regrets? I'm asked a question about what I would do if Iran attacked our ally, a country that many of us have a great deal of, you know, connection with and feeling for, for all kinds of reasons. And, yes, we would have massive retaliation against Iran."
Both candidates have been campaigning intensively in the state. Obama has focused on smaller events taking questions from voters rather than the huge rallies that characterized his campaign before Super Tuesday. The Clinton campaign has dispatched both President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton to small towns all over the state.
Before his basketball game in Elkhart, Obama knocked on doors in a residential neighborhood and quickly drew a crowd. Handed a cellphone, he spoke to someone named Hillary.
"Hi Hillary!" Obama said with a big grin. "And she supports me," he added. "Oh, this isn't Hillary Clinton? Oh, Hillary Van Dyke. Nice to meet you!"
Clinton meanwhile revved up volunteers at her headquarters in Fort Wayne.
"This is the final push," Clinton told a cheering crowd of volunteer canvassers in Fort Wayne.
In a sign of the significance the campaign is placing on Indiana, which has not seen presidential primary candidates since 1968, the Clinton campaign announced she would be in Indianapolis on election night.
Both candidates were scheduled to address the state Democratic annual dinner. Former representative Tim Roemer, an Obama supporter, said Obama would overcome the controversy surrounding statements made by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "We hit a rough patch a week ago," he said. "The fact that people haven't decided is a good thing for us."

The secret world we live in

The lives we lead, and the lives we wish we led.This world, the so-called "real world," is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you'll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you're still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you've seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or you've been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies they make to keep us entertained. It's in between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of being "practical" and "realistic."When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise, wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts (or cities) with fire, they're trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night, or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they're trying to sneak into itfor they know better than us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police, or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of a corporate chain store, they're trying to storm its gates.When you're making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover's body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a new part of the world on a par with a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent, as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or the moon, you are charting its frontiers.It's not a safer place than this one...on the contrary, it is the sensation of danger there that brings us back to life: the feeling that for once, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, there is something real at stake.Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, in the thrill of discovery and transformationbut return you did.Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition, and no more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.You're not the only one trying to find it. We're out here, too . . . some of us are even waiting there for you. And you should know that anything you've ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.Revolution is simply the idea we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.