CLEVELAND - John McCain has a curious recipe for success in Ohio: tell voters their jobs aren’t coming back, and embrace the free trade pacts that are despised here. It’s an approach that led to defeat last month in Michigan, another Rust Belt state that has seen manufacturing jobs disappear. Now that the Republican nomination is all but assured, McCain hasn’t changed his tune.

“Some of those manufacturing jobs are not coming back and you know it and I know it,” the Arizona senator said at a town hall meeting in Rocky River this morning.

Ohio has lost nearly one quarter of its manufacturing jobs in this decade, and many voters here say free trade is to blame. Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, still battling for the Democratic nomination, have been trying to distance themselves from pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement as they campaign here.

Not McCain, who suggested today that high tariffs were a cause of World War Two.

“The economists that I know and trust and the history that I study, and I study a lot of history, says that free trade is the best thing that can happen to our nation. When we have practiced protectionism it has had devastating consequences,” he said on his campaign bus.

No presidential candidate since 1964 has taken the White House without winning Ohio, and the state proved to be the crucial battleground in the 2004 matchup between Republican President George W. Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee. Will McCain’s support of free trade come back to haunt him this November?

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Aaron Josefczyk (John McCain at a town hall meeting in Rocky River, Ohio on Feb. 25.)