The small crowd she attracted in rural South Dakota on Thursday was quiet and polite, with none of the exuberance that usually greets Mrs. Clinton at her campaign stops. (A campaign aide suggested it could have been due to the cultural mores of South Dakotans.)

In Oregon on Friday, her first event, staged in a house in a quiet residential neighborhood, was described as a round-table discussion on the economy. Mrs. Clinton, surrounded by six people at a dining-room table, frequently drifted back to telling stories of economic woe and despair.

She told the story of a couple she met in Ohio who faithfully mailed in their mortgage check every month, only to have their home taken away from them in a home-foreclosure scam.

Mentioning the federal government, Mrs. Clinton said, “There’s such a sense of paralysis.”

“Here we are, the greatest nation in the world, the greatest problem solvers, but we’re not solving our problems,” she said.

Largely absent from her swing through South Dakota and Oregon, two of the four states (plus Puerto Rico) that have yet to hold primaries, was any mention of her opponent. On Thursday, she mentioned Mr. Obama only when she defended him from Mr. Bush’s remarks that implicitly compared him to appeasers of Nazis.

The Clinton campaign began running three more television advertisements on Friday in Oregon and Kentucky, none of which criticized Mr. Obama directly. An aide said that in the coming days, Mrs. Clinton planned to focus on the economy and avoid directly criticizing Mr. Obama.

She cut short what was scheduled to be a two-day visit to Oregon, where Mr. Obama is expected to win, deciding instead to fly to Kentucky late on Friday. She will spend four days there, make an election-night speech on Tuesday and then return to Washington later that day.