McCain extols free trade as answer to loss of jobs in US

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - Republican John McCain made a risky argument in a hard-hit Ohio steel town yesterday, telling residents that free trade can help solve their problems.

That is a tough sell in communities that have hemorrhaged jobs as manufacturing moved overseas and cheap imports flooded the market. But McCain insisted that free trade is the solution and not the cause.

"The biggest problem is not so much what's happened with free trade, but our inability to adjust to a new world economy," McCain said during a town hall-style meeting at Youngstown State University. "So we want people to be part of that revolution, and we've got to be part of that new economy, rather than try to cling to an old economy."

The presumptive GOP nominee, on a weeklong tour of "forgotten" places where people are struggling with poverty and job losses, made a stop at a shuttered steel fabricating plant and criticized Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for saying, when they campaigned in the Ohio primary last month, that they would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

NAFTA expanded trade among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, eliminating most tariffs on a wide range of products from agriculture to cars to computers. Clinton and Obama said they would insist on a new NAFTA deal and would threaten to opt out of the agreement unless Canada and Mexico come to the negotiating table.

"Protectionism and isolationism have never worked in American history," McCain said.

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Remarks that Bill Clinton made became a campaign distraction - again - yesterday on voting day in Pennsylvania, at least on the cable TV shows and political blogs.

It started Monday when he was asked about his comments after comparing Barack Obama's sweeping victory in the South Carolina primary in January to Jesse Jackson's wins in that state in the 1980s. Many Obama backers and black Democrats found that dismissive of Obama's standing and some called it racially insensitive.

But on WHYY radio in Philadelphia, Clinton said the Obama campaign was waiting to accuse him of being racially insensitive. "They played the race card on me," he said. When he thought he was off-air, he followed that up by telling an associate, "I don't think I should take any [expletive] from anybody on that, do you?"

Pressed by reporters yesterday to explain his comments, Clinton seemed to deny that he said them.

Obama was incredulous when reporters asked him about the former president's comments. "I have no idea what he meant," he said. "These were words that came out of his mouth."

Clinton has been both a help and a hindrance to his wife's presidential bid. She claims her experience in the White House as a key selling point on her résumé, but he has sometimes gone off message with controversial comments.

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DURHAM, N.C. - Chelsea Clinton said yesterday that her mother would be a better president than her father because she is more prepared and more progressive.

Chelsea Clinton told about 300 people at Duke University that Bill Clinton didn't have a complete grasp of the inner workings of Congress when he took office in 1993. She said her mother, Hillary Clinton, will benefit from her time in the Senate.

Chelsea Clinton, giving her fullest explanation yet of why she believes her mother would be better, said Hillary Clinton knows how to be productive in Washington, standing her ground on issues but also working with Republicans.

"I think that she'll be a better president because she'll be more progressive and she's more prepared," Clinton said. "She'll just hit the ground running from day one in a way that my father was not as equipped to do."

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Self-styled populist filmmaker Michael Moore urged Pennsylvania voters to back Barack Obama yesterday, saying that Hillary Clinton's actions and words have "gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting."

Moore, an Oscar winner whose documentaries have tackled subjects including guns and General Motors Corp., said last week's debate was "the final straw" and accused Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton of playing "this game of appealing to the worst side of white people."

"How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you," he says in an open letter that was posted on his website Monday.

"You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can't win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry 'Uncle (Tom)' and give it all to you."

Moore has much kinder words for Obama, but more so for the grass-roots activism that his candidacy has energized. "What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change," Moore writes. "My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate."

FOON RHEE