Support or opposition for the free trade deal that links the US with Mexico and Canada has emerged as a major issue in the US presidential race.
A candidate's position on the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 has become a campaign touchstone as both parties debate the loss of millions of US jobs overseas.
Yet trade experts and economists say the reality is that only a small proportion of displaced US workers lost their jobs as a result of the pact that dismantled trade barriers among the three countries.
Far more US jobs have been lost to China, India and other low-wage nations in Asia.
John Edwards, trying to distinguish himself from the Democratic presidential front-runner, John Kerry, brings up NAFTA at nearly every campaign stop, blaming the pact for massive job losses in this country.
"It's a powerful issue, one I can relate to specifically," says Edwards.
The North Carolina senator frequently cites his humble origins as the son of a textile worker who lost his job when his mill closed.
Edwards criticizes his Senate colleague from Massachusetts for voting for NAFTA, says he would have voted against it had he been in the Senate at the time and pledges to renegotiate the pact if he wins the White House.
Kerry shrugs off the comparison.
He asserts that his position on trade and Edwards' are much the same and notes that both lawmakers voted for a measure in 2000 granting permanent trade benefits to China.
But beating up on NAFTA plays well in rust-belt industrial states that are critical to the presidential race and where free-trade is scorned and the trade agreement is still blamed for the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
Edwards' advisers say the issue resonates with voters in upstate New York and in many of the other states holding Democratic primary contests on "Super Tuesday" March 2, including Georgia and Ohio, just as it did in Wisconsin.
In that primary, a stronger-than-expected second place finish last week kept Edwards' presidential race alive.
US President George W. Bush wants to extend NAFTA, which was mostly negotiated under his father's administration and pushed through Congress by former president Bill Clinton, to other nations in the hemisphere and to reach similar free trade pacts elsewhere.
Bush has offered such arrangements to nations such as Australia and Thailand that supported the US in Iraq.
But Bush has not mentioned free trade agreements much lately as he talks about his economic programs and the dispute over displaced US workers.
Bush has had his own problems on the jobs front in recent days.
First he had to distance himself from a White House economist who said shifting US jobs to foreign countries was good for the US economy in the long run. Then the president had to back away from a White House jobs projection that his advisers decided was too optimistic.
The US economy has posted 42 consecutive months of declines in manufacturing jobs, totaling just over 3 million lost jobs.
The bulk of these happened on Bush's watch, making it a potent election issue for Democrats.
Only a fraction of the manufacturing job losses can be blamed on NAFTA, said Gary Hufbauer, a trade expert at the Institute for International Economics.
In fact, most of the jobs were lost not because of trade but because of increases in plant productivity and a reluctance of US companies to hire back workers after the 2001 recession, he said.
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