Nick Timiraos reports from Munster, Ind., on the presidential race.

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Associated Press

Hillary Clinton said on Thursday night that members of Congress should tell the American people where they stand on a plan she backs to suspend the gas tax for three months. “Are they with us or against us?” she said.

But that bit of bombast may backfire. On Friday, one of Sen. Clinton’s top backers, Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, called the gas-tax holiday a “bad idea.”

“I think it would be counterproductive,” Frank said in an interview to air today on Bloomberg Television. “I don’t think it would be a significant savings for the individual. It would be more of a cost.”

Add Frank to the growing list of pols who have rejected the idea, including Clinton supporter and Washington Sen. Patty Murray. Others include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, New York Gov. David Paterson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was particularly blunt on Thursday.

“It’s about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time, from an economic point of view,” Bloomberg, who hasn’t endorsed a candidate, told reporters. “We’re trying to discourage people from driving and we’re trying to end our energy dependence…and we’re trying to have more money to build infrastructure.”

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See data from the latest WSJ/NBC News poll on how the Democratic candidates may fare among different demographic groups.

The gas-tax issue has flared up ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, weeks after likely Republican nominee John McCain first floated the tax-holiday proposal. On Thursday, McCain defended the measure as one that would provide “a little relief” to motorists, and he used that phrase six times in less than two minutes in defending his proposal.

Obama has broken with his Senate colleagues in opposing the measure, a move which opens him up to charges from his political opponents despite the fact that the gas-tax holiday has been roundly criticized by economists and editorial boards.

At a press conference on Friday, Obama pointed out the growing list of politicians who have derided the tax holiday, which would save consumers little while depleting the federal highway trust fund. “It turns out that people…don’t want to be for something that is such an obvious election year gimmick,” Obama said.

Clinton has proposed to make up those lost revenues by taxing oil companies, but it’s not clear that oil companies wouldn’t pass on those higher taxes to consumers. “We ought to say: Wait a minute, we’d rather have the oil companies pay the gas tax than the drivers of North Carolina,” Clinton countered today at a stop in Hendersonville, N.C.

The Obama campaign has sought to focus on the gas tax debate—an issue of rare policy disagreement among the presidential contenders—as the Illinois senator tries to focus attention away from the recent wave of negative publicity brought on by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “Obviously we’ve had to fight through over the last week an awful lot of noise,” Obama told reporters.

He has also talked up his biography more on the campaign trail to dispel criticisms that he’s out of touch. “One of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that Michelle and I were somehow elitist pointy headed intellectual types,” he said on Friday. “Our lives if you look back over the last two decades more closely approximate the lives of the average voter than any of the other candidates.”