CLEVELAND — As the next — and possibly final — round of primaries approaches on Tuesday here in Ohio and three other states, the Clinton and Obama campaigns are focusing more on the delegate quest than the mere winning or losing of the Buckeye State.

With 141 national convention delegates at stake — 92 to be chosen in Ohio's 18 congressional districts and the other 49 statewide — prominent surrogates and volunteer canvassing teams for each candidate are blanketing the state. They include former President Bill Clinton for his wife and their daughter Chelsea, and Michelle Obama for her husband, as well as Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late president.

Clinton's strategists hope with some evident desperation here and in Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont to halt Barack Obama's streak of 11 straight victories going back to Super Tuesday. Winning Ohio, with a strong blue-collar population, could provide a psychological boost, enabling her to claim she is at last in a recovery mode.

But it's the accumulation of delegates that counts now. Neither candidate is likely to win the necessary majority with pledged delegates. So the goal is to get close enough to convince enough automatic, unpledged superdelegates to provide the winning margin.

Here in Ohio, Hillary Clinton has managed to cling to a two-point lead in the latest Zogby poll for Reuters. Even her husband, however, has said she has to win both Ohio and Texas to remain in the race.

That comment was only his latest politically imprudent remark. In the South Carolina primary, he noted that another black candidate, Jesse Jackson, also won the state in 1988. But Jackson was a native son who ran basically unopposed there. The observation was widely interpreted as demeaning Obama's victory.

In campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Ohio over the weekend, the former president was often scheduled into smaller towns in the way normal surrogate candidates usually are deployed. But he is no normal surrogate, and there were criticisms earlier that his appearances with his wife in major markets risked upstaging her.

Her role in the Bill Clinton administration again was highlighted in last Tuesday night's televised debate in Cleveland over her stand on the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1993 and signed by him. Obama cited Hillary Clinton's statements of support at the time, arguing that in claiming her role as first lady as part of her qualifications for the presidency, she could not now disavow that support.

The heated argument over NAFTA, which has come under severe attack in industrial blue-collar pockets of Ohio, has dominated the campaign here.

Obama has scored points by promising an end to outsourcing jobs overseas, while Clinton has talked mostly of "fixing" NAFTA by requiring stronger labor, environmental and wage standards by participating countries.

The political potency of the NAFTA issue in Ohio has made it a sort of don't-touch third rail in urban centers. State Sen. Tom Sawyer of Akron, a former member of the U.S. House and prominent Obama backer, voted for NAFTA as a loyal Clinton supporter in 1993. He later lost his seat when his old congressional district was split.

His vote for NAFTA, Sawyer says, made him a particular target in the new district.

He says now: "I walked a thousand miles with the Clintons (on NAFTA) and it's difficult at this point for her to argue that she wasn't an original supporter" of the free trade agreement.

Clinton's early lead in Ohio, as in many other states, seems to have shrunk sharply in the face of the Obama momentum elsewhere. But supporters suggest the state is like Michigan, which she carried heavily, with its profile of auto making and a workforce in many cities hit hard by outsourcing.

In the Michigan primary, however, all the major candidates except Clinton kept their names off the ballot after the national party stripped the state of its delegates for holding the vote on an unsanctioned date.

A major Obama supporter, Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Commissioner Tim Hagan, challenges the Michigan comparison, citing other states with large blue-collar populations, like Wisconsin, that Obama won handily, and asks: "How is Ohio so different?"

Reach Jules Witcover at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.