By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

YOUNGSTOWN - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry picked the perfect backdrop to emphasize the country's loss of manufacturing jobs Tuesday.

Speaking at a rally in downtown Youngstown, Kerry could look across at the Youngstown Steel Museum, which is about all that's left of the industry that built the Mahoning Valley. Across the street was a boarded-up theater where John F. Kennedy campaigned 44 years ago. The Kerry campaign adorned it with a banner that read, "A Stronger Economy = a Stronger America."

"I see a lot of people here today who are the exact people I'm talking about," Kerry told a late-morning crowd of about 800 who braved a freezing April rain. "It's not just the lost job of one worker. It's the ripple effect all through the community."

Kerry began a two-day campaign swing through northern Ohio on Tuesday, his seventh day in Ohio since the campaign began in earnest. Most of that time has been spent in the industrial north, where the bulk of Ohio's Democratic voters are, and where the manufacturing-based economy has been particularly hard hit.

Bush has visited Ohio twice in the same time, but plans a visit to the Cincinnati area - as reliably Republican as Youngstown is Democratic - next Tuesday.

"They can't come to Ohio," Kerry said. "George Bush can't stand here today and tell you about the jobs he's created."

Kerry hit on some of the same themes at a campaign stop in Cincinnati April 6. But speaking to a rust-belt audience, he hammered even more forcefully on issues of the trade and manufacturing job loss, all but ignoring the foreign policy issues that had been a key part of his stump speech.

He lamented the increasing costs of health care and college tuition.

He blasted Bush Administration tax policies that he says subsidize the exporting of jobs overseas.

And he faulted the Bush Administration for failing to enforce anti-dumping provisions in the Chinese trade agreement, so that when a Chinese factory increased its exports of wire hangers to America by 800 percent, a Cleveland hanger company had no recourse.

Twice, Kerry alluded to comments by U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow in Cincinnati last month that the outsourcing of American jobs overseas "is part of global trade" and that "trade is good for the economy."

Those remarks hit home in Youngstown, which has seen its steel industry decimated over the last 30 years.

"A lot of our grandparents worked in the steel mill," said 18-year-old Tom Kloss, a senior at Austintown-Fitch High School who attended the Youngstown rally with some of his classmates. "My uncle works at General Motors, but even now you can't get in there. Ever since the steel mills shut down, that's all this town knew, and we've never gotten with the times."

In this predominately Democratic part of the state, Kerry was met with none of the flip-flop wielding protests of Young Republican hecklers that distracted him so much at his Cincinnati stop. Instead, the crowds consisted mostly of union workers, Democratic faithful and contributors at a downtown Cleveland fund-raiser.

Pollsters and pundits say Ohio is a key state because it's so evenly divided. Bush won the state by 3 percentage points in 2000, but the latest Ohio Poll has Bush and Kerry in a statistical dead heat. And with the war in Iraq and the economy pushing American voters into one camp or another, campaigns are finding fewer truly independent votes to sway. Turning out the unionized, ethnic voters that dominate northeastern Ohio is key if Kerry is going to win Ohio's 20 electoral votes.

Eighty miles west of Youngstown via the Ohio Turnpike, Kerry's four-bus caravan stopped at the National Slovenian Home on the near east side of Cleveland for an "Ohio Jobs Summit" with Democratic mayors from Cleveland's Jane Campbell to Chillicothe's Joseph P. Sulzer. (Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken, a key Kerry supporter in Ohio, could not attend because of the convention center groundbreaking Tuesday.)

Kerry called the summit "one of the best and most remarkable events" of the entire campaign, goading Bush for not holding similar campaign events in Ohio that would allow him to hear about how the economy was affecting cities.

"The people of the city of Cleveland want nothing more than a job," Campbell told Kerry. "It's the best social program. It's the best crime prevention program."

Kerry stuck to themes of the economy even as reporters - and even some supporters - tried to get him to respond to attacks on his war record and what Republicans call a "troubling" lack of support for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

David Liebling, a Case Western University psychiatrist, used a question-and-answer session to tell Kerry he should be proud of his Vietnam service.

"You earned those medals and ribbons, and what you want to do with them is your right," Liebling said.

Kerry called the 30-second television ad attacking his defense record in Ohio "absurd on its face."

"I'm talking about the issues that are of importance to Americans. George Bush doesn't have a record to run on. He has a record to run from," Kerry said.

Joe Vrabel, a 70-year-old Korean War veteran from Poland, Ohio, and the Ohio District commander of the American Legion, said Kerry's war protests didn't matter.

"We've been fighting this war in the Mahoning Valley for 30 years," Vrabel said. "Except that instead of our soldiers going overseas, it's our jobs."

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com