Bill's Nafta legacy haunts Hillary Clinton

By Alex Spillius in Zanesville, Ohio
Last Updated: 2:59am GMT 28/02/2008

A trade deal signed by her husband has returned to haunt Hillary Clinton as she tries to win working-class support in Ohio.

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Voters in the run-down industrial state have not been slow to remind the former First Lady that they blame the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) for a decline that has seen 200,000 manufacturing jobs disappear since 2000.

The rust belt state, which votes on March 4, could be Mrs Clinton's last stand against Barack Obama, who has won their previous 11 contests in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination.

He is closing the gap in opinion polls and has already overtaken her in Texas, which votes on the same day.

Mrs Clinton staged an "economic solutions summit" in Zanesville in the heart of Ohio's diminishing steel-producing region. Sharing the stage with state governors and industrial leaders, she launched her vision for the economy, the dominant domestic issue of the campaign.

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Democrat economists agree that the problems facing states such as Ohio are so deep and complex that redrafting Nafta would make scant difference.

But perception is all in an election campaign and Mrs Clinton faces a struggle to alter views of her husband's record.

Mr Obama got a further boost when one of the so-called super-delegates to August's party convention switched his support to the Illinois senator.

The move by John Lewis, a congressman in Georgia and a veteran of the civil rights movement, was expected to encourage others to follow suit.

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