Barack Obama pressed Hillary Clinton yesterday on the issue of foreign trade, accusing his Democratic rival of trying to walk away from a long record of support for NAFTA, the free trade agreement that he said has cost 50,000 jobs in Ohio, site of next week's primary.

At the same time, Obama said attempts to repeal the trade deal "would probably result in more job losses than job gains in the United States."

One day after Clinton angrily accused him of distorting her record on NAFTA in mass mailings, the Illinois senator was eager to rekindle the long-distance debate, citing passages from the former first lady's book as well as her own words.

"Ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America," Obama said. "Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America - and I never have.

"The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president," Obama told an audience at a wall-board factory in Lorain, Ohio, a working-class community west of Cleveland.

Later, at a rally in Toledo, he rebutted Clinton's statement that her husband had merely inherited the trade agreement when he won the White House from former president George H.W. Bush. President Clinton "championed NAFTA," passed it through Congress, and signed it into law, Obama said.

Phil Singer, a spokesman for Clinton, said the senator from New York was critical of the agreement long before she ran for president. He cited remarks from March 2000 in which she said, "What happened to NAFTA I think was we inherited an agreement that we didn't get everything we should have got out of it in my opinion. I think the NAFTA agreement was flawed."

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