GRANTS PASS — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton D.-NY. is bringing to Oregon the small-town strategy that helped her win Pennsylvania’s Democratic presidential primary.

“Sen. Clinton has been performing extremely well with working class union households and rural Democrats,” Josh Kardon, chairman of Clinton’s Oregon steering committee, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “We are going to take this campaign to places that most presidential candidates never venture.”

Former President Bill Clinton, who spent much of his time in small Pennsylvania towns in the weeks leading up to that state’s primary, will appear in North Bend tonight and small cities in the Willamette Valley on Saturday before finishing his second Oregon campaign swing in Portland.

Coos County is more than 90 percent white, heavily blue collar, and older than the rest of Oregon — all of which play into Clinton’s political strengths.

Like rustbelt Pennsylvania, the area is struggling to find something new to take the place of a bygone dependence on a dominant industry. Timber once accounted for a quarter of the jobs in Coos County, and growing tourism and service jobs have not filled the wage gap.

There is still a lot of resentment across timber country over former President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan, which cut national forest logging to protect the northern spotted owl and salmon.

“I think a lot of people will come out,” to see the former president, said Coos County Commissioner John Griffith. “I think a lot of people know, though, that he didn’t do anything when he could have helped rural Oregon.”

Democrats still outnumber Republicans — a legacy of long gone union mill jobs — but Coos County voters strongly supported Republican President George Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Kardon maintained Bill Clinton would get a warm welcome.

“Oregon’s economy on the whole did quite well under President Clinton and we have strong reason to believe that Democrats in that area still consider him a fantastic president,” he said.

The Clinton campaign has been calling on Sen. Barack Obama to debate rural issues prior to the May 20 primary.

So far Obama’s campaign has been coy, not agreeing, but not saying no.

Obama campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro said voters have had plenty of chance to see the two candidates in televised national debates, and Obama will return to Oregon in May to continue with a statewide strategy.

“We are making sure all of Oregon sees Sen. Obama’s vision for change,” Shapiro said in a telephone interview. “We are reviewing the best ways to speak to the people of Oregon.”

Unlike Obama, Clinton has issued a specific list of promises to Oregon — called the Oregon Compact — with many aimed at rural voters: restoring federal payments to timber counties to make up for lost logging revenues, supporting veterans and military families, giving the state authority over siting liquefied natural gas terminals, and thinning forests choked with young and dead trees.

But others may land with a thud in timber country. They are closely associated with the environmental groups many in rural Oregon still blame for the demise of the timber industry. These include designating more wilderness areas, protecting old growth forests from logging, and restoring wild salmon.

Kardon said Oregon has changed.

“Most Oregonians agree it’s time to quit cutting down the remaining old growth in our state,” said Kardon, chief of staff to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a superdelegate as yet undeclared for a candidate. “Most Oregonians agree the federal government has done a lousy job of restoring wild salmon populations.”

Reed College political science Prof. Paul Gronke said he did not think the Pennsylvania small-town strategy would work as well in Oregon, where the demographics and economic issues are different — ranches instead of farms, one major population center instead of several, and a continuing growth in population, instead of a loss.

“The old politics sells well in Pennsylvania, because it’s an old state,” Gronke said. “But Oregon is a young state,” both in terms of its history and population.

He added that he expected race would be less of a factor in Oregon, than Pennsylvania. Despite a history of the Ku Klux Klan in the state, Oregon has a very small black population, making for less racial confrontation.