Democrats campaign to keep jobs at home

By Doug Palmer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats across the United States are calling for trade reforms to keep jobs from moving overseas as they campaign to put Barack Obama in the White House and expand their majority in Congress.

In upstate New York, a TV ad shows Democratic candidate for Congress Dan Maffei standing in a grassy field.

"This parking lot used to be full of people coming to work. Today it's full of weeds," Maffei says to the camera. "What did Washington do? They gave a tax break to companies that gave these jobs to China. I'm running for Congress to change that, keep our jobs here and create new ones."

In Oregon, an ad run by Democratic candidate for the Senate Jeff Merkley strongly echoes Maffei's.

"Tax cuts. They ought to go to middle class families. Instead, Washington has been giving tax breaks to corporations that ship job overseas. Imagine, spending your tax dollars to export Oregon jobs and subsidize companies building factories in China and Mexico," Merkley says in the TV spot.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, counts 35 close Senate and House of Representatives races where Democrats are raising trade as an example of President George W. Bush's "failed economic policies."

The result, she says, could be a Congress far more interested in reforming and enforcing current trade agreements than giving the next president - Obama or Republican John McCain - the authority to negotiate new deals that lawmakers are required to approve or reject without changing.

"There will be trade, but perhaps with new rules," said Wallach, an arch-critic of trade deals dating back to the North America Free Trade Agreement approved by Congress in 1993.

Whoever wins the November election, projects like the Doha round of global trade talks could take a back seat to work on repairing the world's financial system, many experts say.

Wallach says she expects the 2008 election to build on the 2006 contest, in which Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate and brought in a freshman class deeply suspicious of the Bush administration's trade deals.

Since that election, Bush has won approval of just one free trade agreement with Peru, while three others with Colombia, Panama and South Korea have languished. In addition, Congress has refused to renew Bush's "fast track" authority to negotiate trade deals, which expired in June 2007.

Ten of the close House races involve a Democratic challenger running against a Republican incumbent in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina where Wallach believes that heavy manufacturing job losses give candidates who insist on "fair trade" an advantage.

Another nine of the House contests are open seats, including the New York race between Maffei, vice president of a financial advisory firm and a former congressional staffer, and Dale Sweetland, a local businessman and county legislator whose website says the way to create jobs is "to cut back wasteful government spending and lower the barriers of doing business."

Obama, who is leading Republican John McCain in the polls with less than two weeks left to the November 4 election, frequently criticizes trade deals that he says cost U.S. jobs.

One Obama ad focuses on the loss of 2,600 jobs when textile industry Carolina Mills closed 17 plants.