He wants a $4,000 college tuition tax credit for "every student, every year," and more money for roads, bridges and "broadband lines in rural communities" paid for with funds now being spent on the Iraq war.
A day later, in Michigan, he backed John Edwards' call to cut poverty in half in the next 10 years.
Obama is repeating the pledges as he operates in a kind of campaign limbo. He's not the presumptive nominee, but he'd like to be seen that way. He can't ignore Clinton, and he can't focus solely on Republican John McCain.
He is visiting not just those states with pending primaries, but those that will be important in the general election. Everywhere he goes, the economy is foremost on voters' minds.
If talk is cheap, policy can be expensive. Each of Obama's ideas - as well as those of Clinton and McCain - carries a price tag. The costs of the proposals, and how they will be paid for, get discussed much less on the campaign trail.
The National Taxpayers Union, which advocates lower taxes and smaller government, pegged the cost of Obama's platform at $307 billion yearly. That was in March, the last time the group updated its figure; at the time, Clinton's agenda cost $226 billion yearly, and McCain's was $6.9 billion, the group said.
Republicans say Obama's total is higher when other less-specific pledges are included.
"He'll tell each group about what he will do for them but what he won't say is that his plans far exceed half a trillion in new spending, and even though he promises middle class tax relief on the campaign trail, he voted for a budget that would raise taxes on individuals making as little as $32,000," said Blair Latoff, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
James R. Horney, a former deputy Democratic staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, puts little stock in those calculations.
"It's very difficult in any political campaign to really do careful analyses," said Horney, who is in charge of federal fiscal policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Candidates, for all sorts of reasons, just don't provide as detailed proposals as you get in the president's budget or you get in congressional committees."
Obama deserves credit, Horney said, for supporting pay-as-you-go practices for the federal budget, meaning that new spending would be offset by cuts elsewhere or additional revenue.
