(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-30 16:43

While campaigning in Ohio, another big manufacturing state, both Clinton and Obama criticized free trade deals and insisted the other candidate was not as reliable a protector of US jobs. Clinton won that state's March 4 primary.

In Johnstown, a woman employed at a call center told Obama that 200 of her co-workers had lost jobs after the work was outsourced to India. She blamed free trade and asked what the Illinois senator would do about it.

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"I don't want to make a promise that I can bring back every job that's left Johnstown. It's just not true. Some of those jobs aren't going to come back," Obama answered.

"What I can do is try ... to create an environment in which jobs are being created," he said, adding that they "may not be the same jobs that left and don't come back."

Obama, who is on a six-day bus tour through Pennsylvania, toured a factory that makes the wires that eventually become Slinky toys. He played with a Slinky through the visit.

Asked whether voters might be turned off by talk of some jobs not coming back, Obama said he was trying to give the phone worker a clear answer.

"The point I was making is that the same jobs are probably not going to come back. We're not going to suddenly see Bethlehem Steel reopen," he said. "What we're going to see is potentially some specialty steel of the sort that we saw at Johnstown Wire that has created a niche that can grow."

Also Saturday, former Democratic contender John Edwards made his first public comments on the race since dropping out two months ago.

"I have a very high opinion of both of them," Edwards said of Obama and Clinton at the Young Democrats of North Carolina convention. "We would be blessed as a nation to have either one of them as president."

At the same event, Chelsea Clinton said her travels have opened her eyes to sexism.

"I didn't really get how much sexism there still was in our country until I was at a rally with my mom in New Hampshire, and someone came up to me and said, 'I just can't see a woman being commander in chief,'" the former first daughter said.

She has always been supported by both the men and women in her family, she said. "I have been so profoundly more grateful than I have ever been over the past few months for my parents because of that."

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