To be fair, Hillary Clinton actually rolled into Des Moines’ Drake Diner with General Wesley Clark this morning to court voters and to enjoy some decaf and a fruit cup before heading out on a long 4-stop swing through East Central Iowa today. Chatting up the breakfast crowd, Clinton sounded genuinely excited to hear that one booth would support her on caucus day, and personally passed out supporter cards to each of them.

Bellied up to the counter with Gen Clark and fmr IA Gov Tom Vilsack’s wife Christie, the trio talked about the early caucus date and the difficulty of campaigning over the holidays — though Christie pointed out that since the University of Iowa’s embarrassing loss on Saturday put them out of bowl contention, more fans and students would probably be around on January 3rd to participate.

Hillary also discussed Global Warming with Gen Clark, who’d just been to a conference on the issue in China and said the Chinese were begging for American leadership on climate change. Clinton said she’d hold meetings on emissions with China as President. “You can’t turn and point a finger at China and say ‘oh, just because you missed the industrial revolution we dont want you to grow.’ That’s not the way you actually get their cooperation,” she said.

Later in Knoxville, IA,  she rolled out some new energy policies to help ease the credit crunch in the housing market, and deal with the spike in energy costs during the winter. But she also took the opportunity to take some broad swipes at Barack Obama on his inexperience and on his Social Security plan.

While she didn’t mention Obama by name, she said “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — our next president… every day spent learning the ropes is another day of rising costs, mounting deficits and growing anxiety for our families.” And she dissed his plan to raise the cap on income taxed for Social Security, which she says amounts to a massive tax hike. “We don’t need more Republican scare tacticts about a ‘Social Security crisis,’” she said. “And we don’t need a trillion dollar tax increase.”

But spokesman Jay Carson was more specific after the speech. On her economic plan, Carson said Hillary “is rolling out policies that he (Obama) doesn’t have.” And on Social Security, he said Obama continues to “spend most of his energy fighting to fix a long term challenge,  and playing into the Republicans hands in the process.”