It's still "the economy, stupid" in Pennsylvania

By Paul Eckert

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) - In 1992, Bill Clinton used the phrase "it's the economy, stupid" to win the White House amid a recession. Sixteen years later, his wife Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting for the Democratic presidential nomination by promising relief from more hard times.

Clinton and Obama served up economic messages this week in Pittsburgh, a steelmaking center in Pennsylvania, whose April 22 primary is the next stop in the Democratic contest to face Republican John McCain in November's presidential election.

Appealing for labor backing from unionized steelworkers, Clinton promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and to get tough with China over counterfeiting and currency and industrial policies she said were the cause of trade deficits and U.S. job losses.

Obama also offered tough talk on NAFTA and China, railed against lobbyists and chief executives who took home huge pay packages while cutting jobs, and told steelworkers he had witnessed 1980s mill closures in Chicago and understood their plight.

These pitches went down well among more than 2,000 United Steelworkers unionists who were bused in from the many distressed mill towns around Pittsburgh.

"Once you start taking the jobs away and closing them down, it affects everything. It all just rolls downhill," said electrician Shelia Williams.

Williams, a member of the "Women of Steel" committee of her union, joined scores of unionists who chanted "no, no" to shut down Clinton when she raised Obama's controversial remarks that small-town Americans were clinging to religion and guns in bitterness over their economic troubles.

"We feel more that he is the people," she said of Obama. "He hasn't been there long enough to have done things against us."

BATTLE FOR JOBS

A Franklin & Marshall College poll published on April 15 showed that 43 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats cited the ailing economy as the most important issue in the race, up from 29 percent in January. Twenty-three percent cited the Iraq war.

"We're in a battle here," said Susan Nicholas, a chemical recovery technician at a Pittsburgh area mill.

"It's very important that our jobs stay here in Pennsylvania, because we are a depressed area," she added.

Pittsburgh gleams and bustles as a center of high-technology and medical research. But the main streets of nearby Monongahela River steel towns like Braddock and Homestead are riddled with empty and abandoned storefronts.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing says Pennsylvania has lost more than 207,400 manufacturing jobs -- a quarter of its total -- since 2000. The group says NAFTA cost 4,016 jobs a year while trade with China took away 15,640 annually.

"Cheap goods have a very expensive price," said Holly Hart, legislative director for United Steelworkers.