Millvale has made news in recent years as often as not for its flooding, but today Democrats there gushed for former President Bill Clinton at the first of four campaign stops as he skips across the state in the run-up to Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.

The morning's political service in what was once a Catholic church and is now a concert hall known as Mr. Small's drew more than 300 of the Clinton faithful who left singing his, and his wife's, praises after a speech of just 12 minutes. He spent almost as much time shaking hands and signing autographs afterward as he moved slowly toward a side exit.

"Just awesome," said Johnna Zacharias of Etna, after hearing the former president give a standard stump speech in which he established Hillary's Pennsylvania bona fides -- the Scranton birth, the family's Penn State football connections -- touched on all the health care and economic buttons, and chided unnamed "elitists" for saying Hillary can't win.

"When I see him I feel he's presidential, dynamic," said Ms. Zacharias as she put together a handful of "Hillary" yard signs that she'd just been handed. "And she has the ability to make a good world for my kids, so they can go to college and have a better life."

Ed Wirkowski, a Millvale councilman and retired Pittsburgh policeman who said he was part of a police detail that guarded Mr. Clinton when he visited Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, said he is a Hillary supporter even though she and Sen. Barack Obama have similar positions on most issues.

"They're almost the same," Mr. Wirkowski said. "The big thing is that we need a Democrat in the White House, though I don't know if one is better than the other. I think she has more experience."

Mr. Clinton, who has made more than 40 Pennsylvania campaign stops for his wife, many of them in small towns like this one, was scheduled to move on to Eastern Pennsylvania later in the day, campaigning in Milford, Tobyhanna and Essington.