LAVEEN, Ariz. (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Tuesday vowed to end subsidies for oil companies and said the country needs to be more energy-efficient and less dependent on foreign countries for fuel.

In a speech focusing on the country's slumping economy, the New York senator said America can create jobs by converting to solar and other forms of alternative energy.

She said Germany, wanting to make itself less dependent on foreign oil, created thousands of jobs by converting some of its energy supply to solar power.

"Arizona has a lot more sunny days than Germany," Clinton told an energetic crowd of 2,500 inside the gymnasium at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, west of Phoenix.

As Clinton promised to squarely confront global warming, a man in the crowd yelled, "Al Gore was right."

Clinton's visit came two weeks before the Feb. 5 primary in Arizona, where she is leading in the polls. The event was billed as a town hall-style meeting but turned out to be a stump speech during which Clinton didn't take questions from audience members.

Clinton struck a theme of addressing problems that she said the Bush administration has handled poorly - a struggling economy, a mortgage crisis, and unaffordable health care and college tuition.

"On a daily basis we are seeing the results of the failed policies of the last seven years," she said.

She promised to create tax credits that she said would make health care and college tuition more affordable for families. "Young people are coming out (of college) with so much debt, they're like endentured servants," she said.

Clinton won the New Hampshire primary and captured the popular vote in the Nevada caucuses. She also won the Michigan primary, in which Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards' names weren't on the ballot.

Clinton didn't win the endorsement of Arizona's most prominent Democrat, Gov. Janet Napolitano, who more than a week ago endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination and campaigned in New Mexico for him on Tuesday.

Polls showed that Clinton began 2007 with about as much support in Arizona as Obama, but she started to break away from him about halfway through the year.

A survey released Tuesday found 45 percent of Democrats who had voted in at least three of the last six elections either supported Clinton or were leaning toward her. The corresponding figures were 24 percent for Obama and 9 percent for Edwards.

Forty-one percent of Republicans either supported Sen. John McCain or were leaning toward him, followed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 18 percent.

The poll of 741 people who voted in at least three of the last six elections was conducted Jan. 17-20 by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University and Channel Eight/KAET-TV. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points for both the Republican and Democratic samples.

While McCain enjoys favorite-son status in Arizona on the Republican side, the state is regarded as wide open for Democratic candidates in the Feb. 5 primary.

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