Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton poses for photos with firefighters during a campaign stop at the Fire Department in Merrillville, Ind., yesterday.

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AP / Elise Amendola

ANDERSON, Ind. — When Bill Riffe was a young teacher, many a promising educator got through college by working nights at one of the sprawling auto-parts plants that made this East Providence-sized city boom.

“By the time they graduated, they’d be making too much money in the factory to go on with teaching. ‘Generous Motors,’ as we used to call it, just paid too much,” said Riffe.

Now the only jobs at the Inland Fisher Guide headlight plant, by the railroad tracks at the edge of town, are on the wrecking crews from North American Dismantling. The smoke-stacked factory, shuttered early last year, is being reduced to brick rubble and rusting piles of scrap that crane-mounted magnets yank into huge Dumpsters.

It’s the kind of loss, said Riffe, that has made the slumping economy the number-one issue as Indiana takes a rare turn in the national spotlight for today’s crucial presidential primary contest between Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Riffe, a retired government teacher at Madison Heights High School, and his wife, Phyllis, the school’s one-time head nurse, have spent a lot of time canvassing the streets of Anderson for Clinton. They say she seems to be doing well, but like their counterparts in the Obama camp, they think Indiana is anybody’s race.

The candidates are certainly treating it that way, and Hoosiers seem quietly pleased to be hosting the first Indiana primary of national note since 1968, when New York’s Robert F. Kennedy defeated fellow Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, of Minnesota.

It’s been “a rough couple of weeks,” Obama has acknowledged on the stump after a big loss in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary April 22 and a flare-up over damaging remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. He has adjusted, trading his ecstatic mass rallies of earlier months for smaller events, roller skating with his young daughters or having a beer with workers in an effort to click with the kind of blue-collar voters who have flocked to Clinton in such big industrial states as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

If he bags the expected victory today in heavily-black North Carolina and edges out Clinton in Indiana, Obama might finally calm the doubts of the “superdelegates” — dozens of still-uncommitted members of Congress and other party leaders who hold the key to the Democratic presidential nominating majority.

Still behind in pledged delegates and in the national popular vote, Clinton has unabashedly called on Hoosiers to give her a “game-changer” today — another big comeback in a heartland state that could raise more doubts about Obama’s prospects as a candidate in November.

INDIANA POLITICOS speak of the state as three distinct regions of sharply different politics and populations. The southern part of the state, a land of hills and rivers settled in the 1700s and 1800s by immigrants from the south, “still behaves politically like a Kentucky does, or a Tennessee,” according to historian and pollster Andrew Downs of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. The area is largely small-town and rural and tends to be conservative and heavily Republican. It is Clinton’s biggest stronghold and one where she is pressing her advantage, according to Rick Fledderman, an Obama backer who is mayor of the small southern city of Batesville. Clinton’s appeal to conservative, lunch-bucket Democrats “is a real testament to her political skills,” Fledderman said, citing in particular the number of visits the candidate and her family have lavished on Indiana.

Obama’s bastion is the northern part of the state, especially around Gary and other cities near Illinois. “It’s basically Chicagoland,” Downs said. “The Region,” as it is known, is influenced by the city’s media market, “it thinks and behaves like a traditional industrial Great Lakes state” and its voters are well-acquainted with Obama’s rise in Chicago politics, Downs said.

The central part of the state is “Indy-centric,” Downs said, referring to the large proportion of the population that lives in and around the capital, the nation’s 13th largest city and an adaptive manufacturing center that is home to the Lilly pharmaceutical empire, among other major employers. Indiana has gone Republican for president in every election since 1964 and has a smaller black population — 9 percent — than the nation at large. Metropolitan Indianapolis, by contrast, has a substantial black population and lately has leaned Democratic.

OBAMA HAS SOUGHT an opening with attacks on Clinton’s proposal for a summer holiday from the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax, which he asserts would save drivers only about 30 cents a day.

“That’s the same proposal that John McCain makes,” Obama told 2,300 Democrats Sunday night at the party’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in the capital city, speaking of the Republican presidential candidate. “Does anybody here really trust the oil companies to give you savings” from a gas tax break? Obama demanded.

But there are some hints that Clinton is breaking through with voters who are hungry for a candidate who appears to be taking action — even modest action — for them.

“I think anything to bring down the price of gas, even if it’s only a cup of coffee’s worth a day, is a move in the right direction,” said Kaylen Barcus, an Indianapolis bus driver who has twice voted — now with some regret — for George Bush and plans to vote today for Clinton. “At least she shows an attitude that she’s going to do something for us,” said Barcus.

Obama has led in Central Indiana but by a shrinking margin that Downs, the historian and pollster, attributes to Clinton’s appeal on lunch-bucket issues. Hence the important role of such outlying cities as Anderson — 35 miles northwest of Indianapolis and surrounded by farmlands that, increasingly, are giving way to suburban sprawl from the metropolis.

It is a city of “rambler” bungalows and broad-gabled Prairie style homes and a small downtown anchored by brick commercial buildings and handsome limestone libraries and churches. Anderson is moderately Democratic, 14 percent black and, by Indiana standards, heavily unionized — although the United Auto Workers have been decimated.

On Saturday nights, 10,000 fans pour into the stands of the Anderson Speedway, a quarter-mile, high-bank asphalt track across Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue from the wreckage of the Guide plant. “The average working guy has to dip into his savings to race every week,” said the track’s proprietor, Rick Dawson, a middle-aged, self-described conservative who wears a droopy mustache and a neat denim shirt with the speedway’s logo on a breast pocket.

After 25 years of decline, the last of GM’s more than 30,000 jobs are gone from its plants around Anderson — gradually triggering school closings, some housing decline and an exodus among the city’s young people. Today the biggest employers in town are the hospital and the public schools.

After a rough patch that began in the late 1970s and got progressively worse, Anderson is mounting a comeback. Nestle, the international food conglomerate, has built a juice- and water-bottling plant in Anderson that will employ several hundred workers. Hoosier Park, a horse-racing track, is building a casino that may bring in hotels and other trappings of tourism.

But there are concerns among Clinton and Obama backers alike that the new businesses will never return the high wages and rich benefits of “Generous Motors.”

“I was blessed to retire from Plant 11 before GM left,” said Cynthia Watson. Watson said economic worries are far and away the top concern of the Anderson voters she knows. “The economy is horrible and crime has gotten worse because of it,” she said. But she said she prefers Obama to Clinton less for any specific economic remedy he proposes than because “I like the way he talks.” Primary primer

Indiana and North Carolina hold their presidential primaries today. Polls close in Indiana at 6 p.m., in North Carolina at 7:30 p.m.

According to the latest state polls, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton leads Sen. Barack Obama in Indiana; Obama leads Clinton in North Carolina.

Any registered voter may vote in the Indiana Democratic primary. Only registered Democrats may vote in the party’s North Carolina primary.

According to the Associated Press, Obama currently has 1,745.5 delegates to Clinton’s 1,608, with 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com