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WASHINGTON — Attempting to reassure anxious donors, Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined her plan for beating current Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama in a pair of primaries next month that even some of her supporters say she must win to stay in the race. Clinton insisted that her campaign is on track and moving forward, despite losing 11 contests to Obama since Feb. 5.

“I am very optimistic and extremely positive about what we’re doing as we go forward in these states,” Clinton said of Ohio and Texas, two delegate-rich states on which she has pinned the future of her candidacy.

“I hear with increasing frequency, ‘Don’t give up, you’re going to win,”‘ she said, speaking at a Boston fundraiser Sunday.

Ohio and Texas both hold primaries next week, with 334 delegates combined, and former President Bill Clinton has said publicly his wife probably needs to win both of them if she is to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Recent polls show the race in Texas to be a statistical dead heat. In Ohio, polls show Clinton with a narrowing lead.

On the Republican side, John McCain’s march toward clinching his party’s nomination moved ahead Sunday as he swept all 38 nominating convention delegates awarded in U.S. territories over the weekend.

Clinton on Sunday pledged to continue to stress her differences with Obama on issues including universal health care, and said she will step up her criticism of the Illinois senator’s lack of experience in public life.

“We’re going to emphasize more and more the experience gap,” Clinton told several hundred supporters who had paid at least $500 (euro335) to attend the Boston fundraiser. “You’ll hear a lot about it the next eight days.”

In Ohio, Obama accused Clinton on Sunday of trying to walk away from a long record of support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he said has cost 50,000 jobs in Ohio.

At the same time, he 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, as the trade deal is known, in mass mailings, Obama was eager to rekindle the long-distance debate, using 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 factory that makes wall board, located in a working class community west of Cleveland.

Later, at a rally in Toledo, Ohio, Obama rebutted the former first lady’s statement that her husband had merely inherited NAFTA when he won the White House from former President George H.W Bush.

President Bill Clinton “championed NAFTA,” passed it through Congress and signed it into law, Obama said.

A spokesman for Clinton, Phil Singer, said the former first lady was critical of NAFTA 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.”

Singer also said that in 2004 in Illinois, Obama spoke positively of the trade agreement, saying the United States had “benefited enormously” from exports under NAFTA.

The trade agreement has long been unpopular in industrial Midwestern states like Ohio, where critics blame it for lost jobs and shuttered factories, many of which once employed union workers who tend to vote Democratic.

Clinton blamed her woes in part on unfair press coverage but said she believed Obama had come under increased media scrutiny in recent days.

“People are starting to say, ‘Hey, you know, we’ve got two candidates. We’ve been a little more focused on one than the other in terms of asking hard questions. Let’s start looking at both of them. The voters of this country deserve to have a real election,”‘ she said.

Still, Clinton expressed frustration that her rival’s record and questions about his health care reform plan had drawn little attention from national reporters.

Clinton attended three fundraisers Sunday, pulling in over $500,000 for her campaign. Earlier, she attended a rally and health care roundtable in Rhode Island, which also holds its primary March 4.

Vermont and Rhode Island also hold primaries on March 4, but have far fewer delegates and have not attracted nearly as much attention.

In the overall race for the Democratic nomination, Obama leads with 1,362 delegates. Clinton has 1,266.5, getting the half-delegate from the Democrats Abroad primary. It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in late August in Denver.

Meanwhile, consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced Sunday that he is launching a third-party campaign for president, criticizing the top White House contenders as being too close to big business. He pledged to “shift the power from the few to the many.”

Nader also ran as a third-party candidate in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. He is still loathed by many Democrats who claim his candidacy in 2000 cost the party the election by siphoning votes away from Al Gore in a razor-thin contest decided by a few hundred votes in Florida.

Nader, 73, vociferously disputes the spoiler claim, saying only Democrats are to blame for losing the 2000 race to George W. Bush. He said Sunday there could be no chance of him tipping the election to Republicans because the electorate will not vote for a “pro-war John McCain.”

The Republican race is considered settled in favor of McCain, the veteran Arizona senator and a former Vietnam prisoner of war.

On Sunday, Republican Party members in Puerto Rico awarded all their 20 delegates to McCain. A day earlier, McCain received nine delegates each from American Samoa and the Northern Marianas in the Pacific. He also picked up endorsements from two unpledged delegates elsewhere.

That gives McCain a total of 998 of the 1,191 delegates needed to clinch the nomination at the Republican convention in September in St. Paul, Minnesota. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, trails with 254 delegates.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:13 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.